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
I’m not a fan of Wes Anderson movies. I mean I love the style and the songs and the acting of course but the plot always falls a little short. At one point or another in the movie everyone will start talking as if they’re reading the...
Last night I watched the new documentary about Garry Shandling by Judd Apatow and I hadn’t quite expected to fall in love with it as much as I did. Quite frankly, it swept me off my feet. There’s so much that I adore about the film – the...
Anil Dash on the early promise of the web: For the first few years of the web, the fundamental way that people learned to build web pages was by using the “View Source” feature in their web browser. You would point your mouse at a menu...
I think, of all things, I miss her voice the most. I've been thinking about this a lot over the last week or so but when we were together I would see her not as a person with a beautiful smile or with any other mesmerizing physical...
I first came across this passage in Artful by Ali Smith that I finished just last week and it’s an unforgivably good quote extracted from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. I haven’t read the book yet, but I believe that in this section the...
The night before the breakup, last night actually, I had a dream about our trip to Lake Tahoe. I was stood at the edge of the water, on the pier we had sat on only a few months before, and I was looking over the edge, down into its...
There’s a song by Jonwayne called Green Light where towards the end Anderson Paak takes the reins and sings one of my favorite lines. Well, sort of. In his mild mannered and eloquent style he says that “the stars align and my God...” but...
In Ali Smith’s Artful there’s this lovely description of what literature and form are capable of (as I understand it, form is how a sentence is structured and how it sounds as you say it out loud): For even if we were to find ourselves...
George Saunders on the art of fiction writing: A guy (Stan) constructs a model railroad town in his basement. Stan acquires a small hobo, places him under a plastic railroad bridge, near that fake campfire, then notices he’s arranged his...
Kory Stamper on the use of the word “shithole” by #45 and what it means for lexicographers: ...the American press has traditionally been loath to print unseemly language like cusswords in full, and this has been a problem for...
We published Tools for Thinking and Tools for Systems the other day and I reckon it’s the beginning of a much larger rant that’ll get round to writing one day. The gist of my argument is this: I think we’ve spent an awful amount of time...
I’ve read this piece about design by Dean Allen multiple times and yet I can’t appear to shake it. Every time I read it I find something new that perfectly summarizes that moment in my career. Here’s a list of design rules from the piece...
Before newsletters and social networks there was RSS, a tool that helped us keep up to date with our favorite websites. And it was relatively simple, too: through a web app such as Google Reader, you could effectively subscribe to...
In a lovely post about the relationship between fiction writing and machine learning, Robin Sloan discusses how he wrote songs for his novel Sourdough with the help of artificial intelligence. However, Robin has some issues with that...
Bond is a new conference set in San Francisco this March 9-10 that “examines how creators make a living through the internet.” I just picked up my tickets and yet I have no idea what to expect, besides the fact that this is a project by...