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
Last week I ran a fun exercise: I wanted to take a week off work and build out The Cascade, the almost-weekly-ish newsletter that I’ve written about front-end development and CSS, and turn it into a full blow standalone...
I zipped through Better Onboarding by Krystal Higgins a few weeks ago and, in my mind, it’s a classic that should be required reading for anyone who makes software. I am serious! It is very good! I can’t remember the last time a book...
Writing is often seen as a tool for teaching or informing, lecturing atop a golden soapbox. But all the best writers I know don’t care much for writing as communication as much as they do writing for just heckin’ figuring things out or...
Two e-essays for your consideration! The first is Models All The Way Down by Christo Buschek and Jer Thorp. It’s all about LAION-5B and the enormous corpus of questionable data that’s used to train AI models under the hood. Here’s the...
DJR just released Indoor Kid, a new variable font for typesetting dialogue in comic books and there’s a bunch of lovely things to note about it. First, I love the idea of a type specimen being a comic book! Second, having an emphasis...
Whenever I’m in a room without a whiteboard I feel trapped. Perhaps this is just the way I have to think through a problem but I can’t breakdown ideas or solutions without a whiteboard or a glass window to draw on. In fact, I’d say that...
Elizabeth Goodspeed: I’ve come to believe that developing taste is not so unlike going to therapy; it’s an inefficient, time-consuming process that mostly entails looking inward and identifying whatever already moves you. It’s the...
Being on the other side of design systems now as a product designer is super interesting. I kinda hate the rules and regulations and nitpicking! And if I can’t lean into the system then I will fight against it with every fiber of my...
Smart idea via Jim Nielsen here: body:has(dialog[open]) { overflow: hidden;} I still haven’t used :has outside of little demos and screwing around in Codepen but there’s been a growing chorus over the last few months about all the tiny...
We made a list on my team at Retool the other day of all the things we’ve done, everything we’ve shipped since the team started back in November. And it’s a lot! Plus, I realized that we’d shipped more in the last four months than I had...
I don’t know if this is a trend or anything but I like the idea of this: keyboard-first apps. Chris shared Godspeed, a todo list app, that has a “hardcore mode” that disables the mouse so you can get used to the keyboard shortcuts even...
That’s the question that PJ Vogt asks Ezra Klein over on Search Engine. It’s a real interesting conversation and there’s a bit where they talk about how the medium you use the most influences the way you think. If you use IG all day...
The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells is fantastic. I admit that I’m real late to the party here but I can't remember the last time I read anything as effortlessly page-turning as this. The first book, All Systems Red, is a breezy 150...
I’ve sat through a lot of discussions about design principles and they always read like weak sauce to me. They focus on pixels or craft or some other wishy washy hand wavy faffery that I can’t apply to my work. Or they’re so generic that...
It’s been about four months since I joined the product design team at Retool and I’ve noticed something in my work click forward. Just a slight nudge, nothing that anyone else would spot. That’s mostly because progress is never...