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
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...
What’s the smallest amount of CSS that you can write to make HTML look halfway decent? I took a crack at that today after I removed all the styles from my website and went back to Eleventy. Here’s what I’ve got so far. First up you gotta...
What the who the what? I clearly have not been paying enough attention to Framer because they just released something called “Framer Sites” which looks impressive to say the least: but the TL;DR is that you can now use Framer as a full...
I just started an enormous project at work. It is blisteringly, gob-smackingly large. The biggest project I’ve ever worked on by far, and just the sort of thing not to be measured in sprints or seasons but whole dang years. And yes,...
Choosing a font is always a problem of size. Sure, you want to pick a serif or a fancy geometric sans—the style is important—but what’s the size of the text? There’s an enormous difference between 14px and 200px and likewise you can’t...
There’s a famous blogger who lives near me. We don’t know each other, I’m as far off their radar as could possibly be. But it reminds of what San Francisco felt like when I first moved here six years ago; less a city full of anonymous...
The most upsetting thing about Elden Ring is not the difficulty, it’s the sheer imagination of the world building. A lot of games are like here’s the snow zone, here’s the forest zone, here’s the desert zone. They’re really not much more...