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
I can’t stop thinking about this story from the latest issue of Codex magazine where an upcoming designer visits Herb Lubalin’s studio and began to wonder at all the facets and inner-workings of this celebrated graphic design agency in...
This time last year I was a pup. I had never used Sass before, I didn’t know what a shell was, and the DOM was a ghostly, nightmarish thing that infiltrated my dreams. Time has zipped by since I joined Erskine a year ago today and I’m...
There is only one law of web design: don’t mess with the scroll. Although there are infinite ways to mess with it, it’s possibly the most underestimated side effect of poor web performance. This might happen when an interface dips...
She spent her days ordering circles, squares and rectangles of color on a page. In her dreams however, in that alternate universe where she might become anything else at a moment’s notice, she believed that similar operations could be...
Whenever I watch a movie or a tv show set in the past I like to wonder how the same event might take place but under more technically advanced circumstances. Take for example a show set in the 1920s in which a character passes away and,...
Much like a blog post, an article, or a book, you don’t need to show your entire life’s work to validate your ideas. It’s not really necessary to talk about that complex relationship that you have with your father and the name of your oh...
This week I came across an interesting design problem: how do you make an SVG that’s being used as a background-image respond to the width of its container, yet also scale its height depending on the child elements within? For example...
This week the Erskine crew headed down to Brighton for dConstruct, an all day event that navigated the tumultuous and the sometimes frightening theme of communicating with computers. From cyborgs and toasters with personalities to...
There’s been various discussions about atomic design, OOCSS and BEM for several years now, but in all the ideas that gravitate around these topics there’s one in particular that hasn’t been fully recognised. As many developers cite...
My hometown was obliterated during the war. Hitler’s Luftwaffe destroyed the pier and the docks, hoping to eradicate the strong Navy presence in and around Plymouth, historically one of the main military ports in the south of England. In...
In Atomic Design Brad Frost recently argued that front-end development could be improved by modularising particular aspects of design. Instead of coding a form as a component that is reused throughout a website, he suggested breaking it...
As a developer I’m always on the lookout for the best applications, the fastest machines and the latest, most colourful updates to a product line. But sometimes I find that this can be unhealthy, addictive behaviour and so slowly, over...
In the town where I grew up it was completely natural for everyone to ignore the machines that hunched in the corner at school and at home, never seeing the potential in them to make interesting things or to learn how they really worked....
Written by Fred Smeijers and published by the Hyphen Press, the second edition of Counterpunch is one of the most mesmerising books ever written about the early stages of typography and printing. Originally the author sets out to...
The longer I use Readmill the more quickly I find myself falling in love. Aside from its clean interface and the fine typography though, the limited number of features don’t really leave much of an impression at first. It took a...