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
Here’s an interesting post by Tobias Frere-Jones about naming typefaces and how this process has evolved over the ages: Years ago, I asked one of my mentors what he thought was the hardest part of designing a typeface. I was expecting...
“Every webpage is a latent community,” writes Clay Shirky in the most lucid piece of writing about Social Media™ that I’ve ever read. Yet despite its yawning blurb, Here comes everybody is not another book about the horrors of...
I do not think it is possible to feel empathy for 7 billion people. I know it is not possible to mourn the ~400,000 souls we lose to death every day on this planet earth. In a city like New York, it is not even reasonable to say Hi to...
I’m adding Peter Mendelsund’s book What we see when we read to the small pile of books that I’ll heartily recommend to everyone – it’s a meandering collection of thoughts about what happens during the act of reading. Unlike the title...
In recent weeks I’ve been trying to improve my fledging JavaScript skills, which have always bothered me. Sure, for the longest time I’ve been able to hack away in order to get something to work in the browser but parsing all the quirks...
For one reason or another I had entirely forgotten about Matthew Buttericks’ excellent book Practical typography which he published last year and asked readers to pay whatever they wanted for it afterwards. In his latest update he...
I get the impression that I’m not supposed to be here; the impassable language, the strange food, and my own fumbling terror as I accidentally stroll through the red light district at eight in the morning. These unfamiliar surroundings...
Nicole Fenton has posted her notes of an excellent talk she gave on how to improve copywriting for interfaces. Sadly though I often tend to neglect lots of this advice, for example the bit where Nicole writes: Don’t assume you’re the...
Over the weekend I read this great collection of advice for writers by Anne Lammot called Bird by Bird. The goal of this short little book is to help young writers learn more about the design and publication of fiction but, aside from...
Over on A List Apart Allen has written an interesting piece about how to make sure that the aging content on our websites isn’t left out to pasture unnecessarily. ...for years, we’ve neglected the disciplines of stewardship—the invisible...
Reading is designed to alleviate our curiosity. We all want to know what’s in our neighbors’ pockets, how they style their hair, how much time they spent on the rusty machine in their garage, or how long and serious their last...
Whilst you’re writing it’s entirely possible to throw everything away and start again if you don’t like how things are working out. If the tone is too harsh or your voice is too light, a quick adjustment can tighten the bolts. Likewise...
From a distance across an ocean, across a network, what inspired me about Chloe was her unrelenting curiosity and kindness. Through her writing I began my little hobby of making playlists every month whilst thinking about owning, as she...
It’s been one hell of a gif-fueled ride, but today is my last at Erskine. When I joined almost two years ago I thought that Git was an English slang and I didn’t know anything about Sass, JavaScript or responsive design. Fresh out of...
In a short story called ‘To Reiterate’ from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis the author wonderfully describes her personal experiences of reading, writing and traveling whilst also taking apart dumb quotations and pithy statements in...