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
Waiting for the moment when it all goes to hell is exhausting. In a relationship, I mean. Each bad joke and every forgetful act, it all has to add up, right? I imagine it’s all counted in a ledger; every single one of their friends that...
I was chatting with my pal Jules Forrest earlier today—she happens to be one of the best designers and developers that I know—and she mentioned something really interesting that I’ve been rolling around in my head all day. We were...
Supposedly TinyLetter won’t be shutting down in 2018 but it seems like it’s being sunsetted and/or merged into the larger MailChimp suite of products. Although that’s probably okay for most TinyLetter fans I’ve always wanted to...
Ever since Brandon Smith’s post about how CSS is Awesome was published in mid-2017 I’ve been entirely obsessed with it. I think it puts into words something significant that hasn’t really been said before about the language: CSS is hard...
The other day the programmer Bret Victor released a series of private emails with Alan Kay (the famous computer scientist) where Alan discusses how we require public, unfettered research to truly innovate because businesses are trying to...
I can’t remember the last time I felt quite like this. There’s a sense that everything’s on track and progress is being made; my day to day work isn’t quite as scary as it was a year ago (in fact now I’m beginning to feel like this whole...
I really like this post by Jeremy Keith on the difference between under and over-engineering: Ubiquity; universality; accessibility—however you want to label it, it’s what lies at the heart of the World Wide Web. It’s the idea that...
Dorothy Thompson, writing in 1941 about a particularly terrifying game called Who Goes Nazi: It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would...
Robin Sloan on his novel Sourdough and the author M.F.K Fischer for FSG: And for me, voice is the thing. In a novel, I will forgive any flaw, overlook any omission, if the voice on the page has that sizzling Tesla-coil energy. A book in...
Jared Spool on the harmful measurement of NPS, the metric that many businesses use, especially in the Bay Area, to define customer satisfaction: We can’t reduce user experience to a single number this is the biggest flaw of NPS. It tries...
I can’t stop thinking about this piece by Jiayang Fan for the New Yorker all about obsession and celebrity worship and Chinese social networks: In China, he felt, it is still possible for celebrity worship to capture the entire culture....
Joe Fassler on writing, focus and disconnecting from the web: As twenty-first-century first-world humans, our first act in the morning is to check our phones—the nineteenth-century word we use to familiarize the glowing portals we carry...
This is just the sort of thing she would hate. Sentimentality, high fives, and any sort of public boasting is not her style and after finding out that I wrote something as nostalgic and emotional like this about her then she’s very...
Andrew Winston writing for Ev’s blog: ...consider the way so many Americans talk about government, like it’s some external group. It’s bizarre. We are government — it’s our shared responsibility. Our neighbors, friends, family, and...
Shakespeare was not a genius. He was, without the distant shadow of a doubt, the most wonderful writer who ever breathed. But not a genius. No angels handed him his lines, no fairies proofread for him. Instead, he learnt techniques, he...