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
This week I signed my first NDA and worked with the team at #######. I had a great time doing a lot of ########. Of course there might have been one or two ##### ####### but then again it could have been ###### # #######. I’m very much...
These are some unedited notes about my week. There are rules. Let’s begin: Freelance work is starting to gain traction, at least according to the data I’m seeing from Cushion, a great tool for freelancers which helps me track the...
This is the beginning of a new side project in which every Friday evening I’ll write for thirty minutes about what I’ve been working on over the past seven days. For a while I’ve been stashing these notes in private but I’ve finally...
Hugh Howey on the self-publishing industry: For every high-cost producer out there getting squeezed by falling prices (which includes indies who have run up their living costs and/or operations costs), there are legions of people who...
“In love one advances by retreating.” Salman Rushdie’s musical opus, The ground beneath her feet, is one of a few select books that I want to slip into my friends’ backpacks, or hide in their bookshelf, or scatter copies under their beds...
Make a note of your favourite writers. Now, read their first names aloud. Next: scan the book-jackets on your shelf, or the stream of ebooks on your Kindle, and imagine those authors standing right there in the room with you. What do all...
For a while now I’ve been toying with a story. It’s a quick thought that stretched into an idea which might, maybe, perhaps, possibly turn into a BIG thing. This idea isn’t so much an elaborate story with an intricate, winding plot – nor...
I’ve been going back through Ftrain thanks to Paul Ford’s talk at XOXO, and there’s a wondrous archive bundled up in this old site of his—years and years of journal entries. This post about his grandfather’s funeral is particularly...
Somehow I’ve found myself in a room bustling with all the languages of Europe—they’re mixing out in the dusty air around me; Dutch and German, Greek and French, others are arguing in Romanian (or perhaps Italian) whilst they nudge past...
Anita Sarkeesian writing for the NYT: In 2006, I was drawn back into video games when Nintendo introduced a new system with intuitive motion controls and a quirky name, Wii. Nintendo projected the message that this new console was for...
Erik Kwakkel on medieval deskstops and how they were designed specifically for reading: While it is easy to find images of scribes with a desk full of books, it is less common to encounter readers in similar situations. That is to say:...
William Weaver, the translator of many of Calvino’s books, wrote this great piece about his relationship with the author: Writers do not necessarily cherish their translators, and I occasionally had the feeling that Calvino would have...
Ross Andersen, an interview with Elon Musk ...a one-way trip to Mars could be a tough sell. It would be fascinating to experience a deep space mission, to see the Earth receding behind you, to feel that you were afloat between worlds, to...
Here’s a neat post from Sally Kerrigan, where she helps writers to make that sometimes terrifying rough draft: Now you just need to start putting your ideas on paper. Try not to reread until you absolutely have to, preferably on a...
Kathy Sierra, Trouble at the koolaid point: It begins with simple threats. You know, rape, dismemberment, the usual. It’s a good place to start, those threats, because you might simply vanish once those threats include your family....