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
Tell the stars I’m coming, Make them leave a space for me.
When it comes to drawing a design system in Figma or Sketch or what have you, there’s a question we have to ask ourselves all the time: what should we document? And what should we leave out? So we want to have our icons and colors in...
A clock arrived one day at our door. A special clock. But the mechanism inside had failed in some way. We checked the batteries, examined the little gears, everything looked fine. But no tick, no tock. The clock was busted. After ten...
My goodness, what a website this is: All 2,242 illustrations from James Sowerby’s compendium of knowledge about mineralogy in Great Britain and beyond, drawn 1802–1817 and arranged by color. I’m unfamiliar with Nicholas Rougeaux’s work...
The light is perfect today; the sky a glacial blue, the sun setting off to the left. On the hill just over there, layers upon layers of houses like a great slanting and disorganized cake. I watch them everyday. When I wake up they’re...
Monica Byrne made an anti-resume way back in 2013—it’s a spreadsheet that lists all her publishing failures and puts her success into context. This is a cool and punk-rock idea! It reminds me of Kat Huang’s Failure Resume that I spotted...
Here’s a real interesting piece about gifts and software: Not every project on github is the same. Not everyone has the same motivations. Giving them money won't change their motivations. Trying to pay them or regulate them taints the...
Today I fixed a few bugs and updated the colors and spacing; the little things, stuff no-one will notice. But dang, it feels so very good to tweak my website and watch 12 hours straight of The Lord of the Rings. It shakes off the...
I reckon 2021 was the best year for CSS since…2015? I haven’t felt this level of excitement and momentum in years. In the last twelve months container queries and the :has pseudo selector went from a pipe dream to almost-shipping in...
Dan Brooks: This is how NFTs make me feel: like the future is useless but expensive, and world-altering technology is now in the hands of a culture so aesthetically and spiritually impoverished that it should maybe go back to telling...
I wrote a lil thing about why we should care about writing, even as front-end developers and designers: How do you make a great website? Everyone has an answer at the ready: Flashy animations! The latest punk-rock CSS trick! Gradients!...
Elaina Natario on the perceived femininity of CSS and the sexism that haunts our industry: There are surely plenty of people of marginalized gender experience in all programming spaces, but they don’t have as much opportunity to surface...
I know I’m somewhat biased, but oh boy oh man howdy do I love this collection of end of year thoughts over on CSS-Tricks. I especially love this note from Geoff when he argues to carefully read your website: If there’s only one thing you...
Vectro Type is a heckin’ neat website and type foundry from the folks that made Chartwell—a somewhat revolutionary font from back in the day that let you type in a series of numbers (c+67+33 for example) and it’s OpenType magic would...
I’ve only just started this excellent book called Web Browser Engineering but it’s already so dang good that I have to stop reading it in order to quote this section: The web is a grand, crazy experiment. It’s natural, nowadays, to watch...