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
For the longest time I’ve taken the sidelines in most arguments, both online and in daily conversations with strangers. I believed that trying to correct the facts or convince people of my own argument was futile and, in some ways, kind...
Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian: How to ward off atrophy and routine, you ask? Well, I can give you a small and perhaps ridiculous example. Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page....
Madness, Rack and Honey is a collection of lectures by the poet Mary Ruefle in which she contemplates the various struggles surrounding her art, and gosh darn it if this book isn’t endlessly quotable. I haven’t been able to put it down...
Lately I’ve been reading a fabulous string of novels yet it’s made me feel a little guilty about ignoring the more science-oriented and fact-driven prose out there. So I’ve been making my first tentative steps into the field of physics...
Earlier this week I headed off to the Future of Web Design conference in London to give a talk about systems, language and maintainable interface design which was adapted from an essay I wrote back in December called A Visual Lexicon....
The weeks leading up to a speaking event my nerves will inevitably begin to shake; I bite my lip uncontrollably, my mood swings from ecstatic to horrified and back again, whilst sleep becomes entirely out of the question. Soothing these...
Whirls of color and texture flipped by, one after another, up on the projector in front of us. Pitch-perfect typographic settings and illustrative allusions were printed onto these book covers, each striking the balance between...
Last week I wrote about an interesting method for setting type by using a brand new feature in Sass 3.3 called maps. This essentially lets you store lots of data in nested lists which can then be accessed via a mixin or a function. In...
Typographica has once again published a collection of reviews about last year’s type releases and so I’ll be spending the next couple of days carefully bookmarking and reading each of them in turn. This is one of my favourite annual...
Last weekend I finally picked up Inside Paragraphs, a book by the illustrator and type designer Cyrus Highsmith. Essentially the book is a primer into the typesetter’s world, with the succinct writing being wonderfully complemented by...
Written by the prolific Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night examines the history, culture and religious circumstances surrounding the establishment of libraries, both public and private. Throughout what seems like a rather short book...
Robert Bringhurst, The Solid Form of Language: Hebrew script, to many, is a badge of Jewishness, Arabic script a badge of the Islamic faith, Devangari script a badge of Hindu pride, Cyrillic script a badge of Slavic solidarity or Soviet...
In Six Memos for the Next Millennium Italo Calvino outlines all of the attributes and properties of great writing that he believed ought to thrive into the distant future of literature. One extract which I particularly adore is from the...
Trying to keep the number of book recommendations to a minimum is difficult when I keep stumbling over novels by Ellen Ullman (here’s my micro-review of her first book, Close to the Machine). This time though it’s The Bug, a story about...
In moving to the next generation of consoles I’ve found that it’s somehow managed to fill me with a deep and bitter sadness. This is mostly thanks to the ‘Library’ menu which is hidden amongst the rest of the interface of the Playstation...