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
Saccharine, careless, melancholic, naive, questioning, questionable, dashing, daring, and vengeful. Inquisitive. Soaring! Doubtful, distrustful, apprehensive, hesitant, unready, unabridged, undecided, unwavering. Woeful. Well-researched,...
I’m happy with this here website for the first time in years. There’s still a lot to fix but since I nuked my website and started from almost-scratch a few months ago, I think this is a good place to stop and look back at what I’ve built...
Neil Gaiman in Smoke and Mirrors: (Fairy tales, as G.K. Chesteron once said, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.)
Daniel Temkin’s Olympus sounds punk as hell: We command machines as if they were are servants, and yet they often do not do what we want. Olympus is a new programming language which better reflects the actual power dynamic of programmer...
I was trawling through the interweb the other night and I saw someone mention “ranged media queries.” My immediate thought was how dare anyone ship ranged media queries without consulting me and then my second thought was what the heck...
TypeMedia is a type design masters program in the Netherlands and each year a graduating class of designers band together to make a little website showcasing their work. I get real excited for these because they’re always a delight and...
There’s an idea in David Eagleman’s Livewired that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this week. Here’s the setup: our brains have a physical map of our bodies printed on them. You touch this part of your brain—blam!—your elbow...
“I am happiest in the second,” he said. “I can look at each frame of my animation and tell you what’s wrong, what the right order should be, and then fixate on that one perfect second for days. That’s what makes me happy.” Fancy wine in...
I took a lot of photos for In Praise of Shadows and after a ton of humming and hawing and editing in Lightroom, I think I discovered at least one or two good pictures in the batch. So! Considering I hid all that with the stubborn text...
How is writing going to be affected by AI tools like Sudowrite? Josh Dzieza has written this fabulous piece for the Verge called The Great Fiction of AI in hope of finding some answers. He tells the story of Jennifer Lepp, a fiction...
Whenever I open up DevTools and inspect a website I feel this overwhelming sense of lost potential. Here’s just one example: today I wanted to buy a pillow so I went to casper dot com, and saw this lovely animated gradient on a banner...
Pals! Nerds! Photo-buddies! I just hit the big green publish button on a new essay called In Praise of Shadows. Here’s the cover: It’s an essay about photography and my new camera, the FujiFilm X100V, but it’s also about what I’ve...
Klim Type Foundry just released The Future, a reimagining of Futura but from the original sketches rather than the more polished version that we’re all familiar with today. Kris Sowersby writes about all this and the history of Futura as...
Jia Tolentino: The future that we now inhabit will not resemble the past before Roe, when women sought out illegal abortions and not infrequently found death. The principal danger now lies elsewhere, and arguably reaches further. We have...
I made a bunch of fun updates to the site last night: fixed a lot of the default typography styles (they’re not good yet, please hold!), added a few colors, replaced a ton of tags in older blog posts, and sort of redesigned the homepage...