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 think about pain by separating it into two categories; High and Low. High-level pain is the sort that we feel on a daily basis. It’s the emotional tide that we’re riding at this very moment. When someone makes us angry or upset, when...
Darkness has trickled in over the hills across the runway and I’m left wondering whether I’m running away from a city once again. This time it’s San Francisco. And this time it’s in December. I remember only a few months ago returning to...
Jeremy’s post about his first decade with Twitter made for interesting reading, particularly in how he compares the use of that service to the longevity of his website: I’m not sure if my Twitter account will still exist ten years from...
I’ve been a big fan of David Jonathan Ross’ Gimlet for the past couple of months and from time to time I find myself picking a character at random and poking at it. Look at that capital Q! Or the & symbol! Gimlet tempts us to sit back...
The scene opens onto a gloriously dark and grimy café where my father and I have taken refuge from the storm that hovers above; clouds snap and crackle, a gale shudders along the windows whilst trees distort themselves into torturous...
My greatest failure as a designer is asking the wrong question at the wrong time. I often jump ahead too quickly and make a string of assumptions because I want to skip to the fun part of designing an interface; fooling around with...
I’m moving to San Francisco. After months of waiting, hoping, with fingers-crossed, the stars in the constellation of American bureaucracy aligned themselves this morning as I stood in the queue at the U.S. Embassy in London. But there...
I often forget which landmass I should attribute my birth right to. I mean, what are the differences between the English and the Scots again? Are the Welsh English? How can one half of Ireland not be in the same country? Should I call...
This is a sharp and brilliant piece by Andrew Flowers. He looks at the current research behind universal basic income, where the government would effectively cut social benefits and replace them with a single wage for both rich and poor...
Chris messed around with a famous essay by Leonard E. Read called I, Pencil and I love it so much: How are these words delivered to you? Massive networks of wires! Fiber-optic undersea cables line all the oceans and seas and grip the...
After a rather unfortunate set of circumstances, which I’ll make sure to write about soon, I’m now available for contract web design and front-end development work. From now until late May 2016 I want to work on as many projects as...
You might be familiar with the fog of war. This is how designers obscure sections of the video game world until one of the characters has stepped through it. The idea is to build a sense of tension and adventure; the fog supplies the...
Yesterday Adam Morse wrote about webfonts, which, well...the gist is that webfonts are bad for usability and performance so we should effectively ditch them: I’ve heard a lot of arguments about why to use webfonts. In none of those...
In all the excitement of recent months I forgot to mention that a couple of weeks ago we finished work on an update to The Outpost website. Blend modes! Viewport units! object-fit magic! This teaser combines a lot of the techniques that...
I wrote up a quick overview of two of my favourite CSS properties lately. I’ve found that in general day-to-day interface design that I keep returning to these new methods to manipulate inline images and so I thought someone else might...