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 one way to improve the thing you’re writing: cut the intro. Writing about the symbiosis between trees and mushrooms? Don’t start talking about how humanity has depended on trees since the blah blah blah. Just jump right in!...
Earlier today I wrote a thing for the ol’ newsletter about which color space you should use in CSS and I mostly focused on background gradients just to explain the core concepts to myself. However! I totally missed this post about why...
I’m starting a new project called The Cascade, a weekly newsletter that’s entirely dedicated to the front-of-the-front-end and CSS specifically, with the very first edition coming hot off the press tomorrow morning. My goal here, for...
I’ve always loved a good footer at the end of a website. It sets the tone for how you leave, gives you links to more interesting things, and is the last chance for a bit of whimsy and fun and charm. footer.design is a great collection of...
Sometimes I get bored of typography. Lately I’ve just seen the same stuff over and over again; the same kind of websites, the same kind of aesthetic, the same letters. They’re on billboards and websites and printed in books, and this rut...
Erin Kissane just published a fantastic and terrifying piece about Meta’s complicity in the genocide of Rohingya people in Myanmar: From far away, I think Meta’s role in the Rohingya crisis can feel blurry and debatable—it was content...
I’ve been showing my work to design teams at companies lately and these conversations can be brutal. Not the acting or the showmanship or the awkward silences. Not even my terrible, unforgivably bad jokes. What I struggle with most is...
Nicholas Rougeux made this wonderful archive of Metra train tickets from Chicago, and it reaches back more than 50 years. Nicholas just updated the gallery, making it easier to navigate and what not and so I’m embarrassed I’ve never seen...
Mentioning e-readers in 2023 feels like a forbidden subject and recommending an e-reader is almost sinful. It’s like committing a crime by breaking a pact of silence and then following that up by being incredibly boring whilst you do the...
Today I launched an update to my website! I’m not entirely sure which version I’m on at this point but I’ve been calling it v13 whilst I’ve been working on it and so that’s what we’ll stick with for now. The goal here was to merge the...
Chris makes a really good point in his reply to my post, especially where he says that websites are fine out of the box: What’s extra fricked about all this is that you really gotta try to screw up a website as much as we do. Pick a...
Jonas Downey wrote about how he dealt with his job blowing up: One major cause of suffering was that I had associated my identity and personal sense of self-worth with my company and its culture. Although I was not an owner of the...
A few years ago I walked into a bookstore and noticed something peculiar: I found that every book was okay. In fact, books had gotten pretty damn good! A random book in a random bookstore is likely to have an interesting cover with good...
Daemon Voices is a collection of essays about storytelling by Philip Pullman and there’s this one bit I can’t stop thinking about. It’s where Philip argues that there’s two types of paintings. First, there’s the kind that are about...
Here’s Leah Spencer writing for Alphabettes about her fabulous work as a graphic designer for film and TV. Her job is to create all the typographic objects that you might see in a show like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel but Leah says that...