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
It’s the final day of XOXO and I’m sat under a canopy watching the prolonged withdrawal of a beautiful evening — shadows flitter their way across skin left bare by shorts and dresses as everyone has now gathered outside after the talks....
In Making charts with CSS over on CSS-Tricks I take a look at a few interesting ways to make bar charts, sparklines and pie charts without resorting to a JavaScript framework. Using JS isn’t necessarily a problem here but sometimes we...
I’m starting a newsletter called Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan and Derelict where I’ll begin to publish a short story once every other week. This is a place to help me learn how to write dialogue and think about character development and...
Since my early childhood I believed that I was a New Yorker in exile. The atmosphere, the energy; I gobbled up every part of it that leaked through a TV or found its way to me via magazines, posters and books. I felt that not only had I...
I’ve been obsessed with blend modes over the past couple of weeks. First it started when I noticed how the Almanac was missing both mix-blend-mode and background-blend-mode so I went ahead and fixed that. Even though I’d been through the...
Working on a project with a styleguide for the first time is encouraging me to document my code a lot more than I usually do. It’s also surprising to reveal how little I truly understand about the complexities of CSS and writing code for...
It’s been eleven weeks of these little notes and so much has changed over that time. I’m not really sure who’s reading them but hey these are really just for me to push myself to getting stuff done each week. In fact it’s sort of...
This week I was recovering from a fever/cold/nightmare illness that left me with an awful lot of email and unfinished tasks ready for next week so unfortunately nothing much happened of note. I did help write a primer on BEM though; it...
This week I’ve been in Nottingham working with the team at Kind on a freelance gig. What’s particularly interesting is that this is the first project I’ve worked on that’s been styleguide-first—so before a single mockup is visible in the...
The last fornight has been exceptionally busy so I sort of missed out on last week’s post, but I’ve finally managed to find a spare moment and so here it is in all its unedited glory: Typographica published a collection of typeface...
On Monday I published an article about the HTML5 History API. It’s sort of crazy to think that I contribute to CSS-Tricks on a daily basis now, especially since I’ve been following Chris’ work for almost a decade. Back when I just...
This week I’ve been messing around with a few side projects after a month of heavy freelance work and subsequently I’ve been trying to play catch up with the backlog of articles, talks and posts about front-end development that I’ve let...
There are stories that appear to grasp all of my thoughts and loves and ideas right out of thin air and hurl them onto the pages of a book. These moments are few and far between but lately I had that very experience with You, a novel...
I’m feeling pretty guilty about what I’ve accomplished over the past seven days; right now I’m at that troubling stage of freelance work (which I assume everyone passes through at one stage or another) where I’ve promised far too much to...
These are some notes about my working week. There are rules that I break trying to write them. This week I’ve been thinking about how to tighten up my process for developing websites and I wondered how I might tidy up all those little...