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
At Gusto I’ve been working on a spreadsheet interface that’s a little complicated and elaborate but it got me to wondering how we might build the simplest responsive spreadsheet possible with nothing more than CSS and so I wrote about it...
The other day Tim Brown noticed that this old post had been deleted and so I rescued it from the Wayback Machine. It’s a post from several years ago where I wrote about a new typesetting system that we had developed at Erskine. Please...
The Biodiversity Heritage Library has made a huge stock of archival illustrations and imagery available on Flickr, as Josh Jones mentions in Open Culture: The first stream, currently at 122,281 images, has been carefully curated, and...
Ali Smith’s potent and luminous novel How to be both has been sitting on my desk for several days as I wait to return to it and write something even remotely coherent. But I realize now that will be impossible: How to be both is the...
The NYT has a great post about Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey, but here’s a snippet of the opening lines of the poem from a real good thread that I can’t stop thinking about: Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me...
The more I learn about design, and the more experienced I become in the field, the frequency with which people ask for this sort of advice increases: Can you review my code? How can I improve the UX of this feature? How would we...
A moment; brief, and fabulously memorable. Three of us were sat in a restaurant in the Haight enjoying drinks and a fine bookish conversation when it struck me: this was a moment that I’ll remember for the rest of my life. It’s not as...
Helena Fitzgerald on kudzu, money, sex and the color green: I look for greens, teasing them out of photos, trusting them too much when I find them, giving far too much credit to any place that will offer me the greatest possible...
I still come back to this post by Merlin Mann called Making the Clackity Noise, years after I first read it, where he asks us all to write a little bit about our lives every day. Like small things; what we’re struggling with today, what...
After more than a year of working on Adventures in Typography, a weekly newsletter that I write about typography and design, I’ve figured out what it is or really what I want it to be. And so now I thought it’s as good a time as any to...
There’s this troubling belief when just starting out as a writer that your favorite texts aren’t just bits of paper strung together but are instead works of art; ethereal and everlasting. This is constantly reinforced in popular culture,...
I often think about a post that Mandy Brown wrote way back in 2009 called Ways of Reading. In that post Mandy argues that we should “always read with a pen in hand” and “think of the text as the starting point for your own words” –...
Robin Sloan’s Sourdough is a precious thing. It’s a novel set in the Bay Area about the making of a mysterious bread and the programming of an artificial intelligence for a robotic hand. I would mention something more about the...
I’ve been reading James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time over the past week and it’s surprising to me that I don’t find his work as celebrated as it ought to be. I’ve watched some of his debates and read a couple of his books and each time...
Ta-Nehisi Coates on the American Civil War and Confederate, the new tv show by HBO: For while the Confederacy, as a political entity, was certainly defeated, and chattel slavery outlawed, the racist hierarchy which Lee and Davis sought...