Robin Rendle
Robin Rendle
Robin Rendle
I’m Robin, a British designer, writer, and typographic nuisance from San Francisco. Today I’m a designer at Apple although previously I’ve made software at Retool, Sentry, and Gusto as well as for clients like Buttondown and XOXO.
Latest Posts
Here’s a lovely monospaced font by Helena Zhang that’s worth checking out. It has just the right amount of charm and charisma, but it’s still readable at small sizes. I’m downloading this thing immediately. Also: Departure Mono is a...
Last night I finished Moonbound, Robin Sloan’s latest novel, and now I am deeply, thoroughly annoyed that there aren’t seven of them lined up already for me to blitz through. I demand EarthBound, SeaBound, SpaceBound! This is the kind of...
There’s this scene in Halt and Catch Fire that I think about all the time. Lee Pace (played by me) walks into an empty office with his business pal and smiles at all the emptiness. “Look,” Lee says, pointing across the room towards a...
Here’s a fantastic post by Chevy Ray about how they made a dozens of pixel fonts using Rust: Kerning was a big time hog when making my previous font packs. Because the tools I was using required every kerning pair to be manually entered,...
Man, it feels good to see Geoff back at the helm over at CSS-Tricks: Remember these? Chris would write a post now and then to chronicle things happening around the ol’ CSS-Tricks site. [...] That’s why I thought I’d dust off the...
I really enjoyed this post by Miriam where she pokes back against the whole “design ain’t a democracy thing” and argues that teams don’t need a boss, they need a process instead: What we like about a dictator is that they have a vision,...
Great episode of the Shop Talk Show here with Chris and Dave where they chatted about that whole vibe driven development thing and I worried listening back to the episode that my original post was...misleading. And arrogant. Okay, and...
The other day I was wondering what it would feel like to live my life with the comfort and safety of universal basic income: it would open up so many doors! Opportunities! Space to breathe and think! I likely wouldn’t quit my job, but I...
Jenny Wen: The way I’ve seen great work made isn’t using any sort of design process. It’s skipping steps when we deem them unnecessary. It’s doing them out of order just for the heck of it. It’s backtracking when we’re unsatisfied. It’s...
Pavel Samsonov wrote this great thing about how Nike got bit by chasing the data instead of making a better product: It’s tempting to reach only for the data that’s easiest to harvest, and stop there. That’s exactly what Nike did with...
DJR has published a fantastic reintroduction to Roslindale that digs into the history behind the type family and why this style is still relevant today: Fonts are subject to fashion, they ebb and flow just like tastes in music and...
Democracies are the worst way to build a product. This is the reason why most tech companies are slow and ineffective: managers aren’t really there to make decisions, set a vision, or settle disputes. These sorts of organizations are...
I’ve been using Obsidian to write a story, partly for fun, partly as a de-stresser, but also to try my hand at a different form of writing. And one feature that I adore is the graph view which shows the relationships between your...
As I was walking around The Computer History Museum in Mountain View yesterday I couldn’t shake this one quote that I’d read earlier that morning: “The computer is a feeling,” says Tim Hwang and Omar Rizwan in their blog post manifesto,...
The ugliest part about tech is the lingo, the language, the words that we use to describe our work and each other. It’s all super gross to me! For example, the way we describe the different kinds of work. In this world there are managers...