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
Paul Ford describes the early days of the web: Then along came HTML, and what I remember most was that sense of being back inside the file. Sure, HTML was a typographic nightmare, a bunch of unjustified Times New Roman in 12 pt on...
For the past year I’ve been trying to get my freelance business off the ground and thanks to Cushion it’s been an awful lot less stressful and terrifying than it might have been otherwise. Cushion is an app for organising a freelancer’s...
From the archives of iA, Putting Thought Into Things: Listening is a masochist endeavor. To do it right you have to put everything down. Not just your phone, even pen and paper. There is nothing to hold on to when you just listen. You...
I’ve been listening to the interviews on Longform over the past week—in between cleaning, working, heading to the gym—and they’ve been so consistently insightful. Here are my favourites so far: George Saunders on ‘the long corridor’ and...
Here’s an article I wrote for CSS-Tricks where I discuss all the benefits and troublesome problems of the new font format that Nick Sherman mentioned at Ampersand: I think there’s huge potential for a new variable font format to become a...
Micah Lee on his work regarding the Snowden revelations: Working in Tails to remain anonymous while I developed the site, however, meant that this would be trickier than the web development I’d done in the past. I didn’t have access to...
Over on CSS-Tricks I've written an intro to font loading and discussed the problems with the Flash of Unstyled Text approach that many designers today still prefer: Several years ago the consensus on font loading in the community was...
This year’s Ampersand was a perfect cavalcade of typographic misadventures which has left me buzzing with ideas. First up was Indra Kupferschmid’s fascinating talk about web typography and I jotted down a couple of useful points she made...
I keep returning to Craig Mod’s fervent, potent ideas on what it means to be a part of the web, both as a citizen and as a large publisher: All I know is the more I read digitally, the more this feeling — the strange joy of adding to the...
An alluring, essential talk called Big data, no thanks from James Bridle: This is the first electronic general-purpose computer, the ENIAC, which was built at the University of Pennsylvania between 1941 and 1946. It was used extensively...
(One remembers involuntarily and with goosebumps that in 1876–78, Edward Robert Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, First Earl of Lytton GCB GCSI GCIE PC (to whom, incidentally, Lady Windermere’s Fan was dedicated), serving as the Viceroy of India,...
William Zinsser's classic On Writing Well contains outstanding advice for writers, but the part I constantly think about is the section on editing: Learn to enjoy this tidying process. I don't like to write; I like to have written. But I...
I'm in love with this short story by Borges: No, he replied. Then, as if confiding a secret, he lowered his voice. “I acquired the book in a town out on the plain in exchange for a handful of rupees and a Bible. Its owner did not know...
When an alcoholic describes their inexorable lust I realise it's precisely how I would describe my relationship with Food. Unlike drinking or smoking however, I still have to eat Food everyday. And not as a guilty compulsion, but as a...
A while back I had the pleasure of joining Charles Peters and Tom Carmony on a special episode of Viewsources all about typography and design. We talked about our favourite type systems, how to get started in the industry and how to make...