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
This weekend we’re in Napa for C’s birthday. We lounged by a river and a fire pit, binoculars in hand, listening and waiting for the birds to show themselves. Earlier that morning we had a falconry lesson with Daisy, a large, powerful...
It all began with the nav. Notice how in the sidebar of this here blog where you can open and close folders to reveal more entries? Well, the tappable area of the arrow was way too small and I kept miss-clicking and selecting folders...
Uketsu’s Strange Pictures is real good. It’s one of those rare books that make you realize that a novel is a game, not just a bunch of text printed on a page. And the way that Uketsu reimagines their novel is with drawings and diagrams,...
I can’t stop thinking about a series of blog posts by Eleanor Janega I read a couple of months ago. The first is called There’s no such thing as the ‘Dark Ages’, but OK, where she writes: The medieval period was not a period of...
Watch out: a new website appears! Yesterday I published the ninenteeth official version of this website and this time round it’s inspired by the work I’ve done on developer tools these last few years. It’s my own personal IDE: you can...
It’s 4am and I’m waiting for the sunrise. I can’t remember the last time I did this—perhaps back in college after the season finale of Lost? But right now it’s pitch black outside. I can’t sleep thanks to the jet lag and my body’s...
I’ve been thinking about the web and how it’ll change with the increasingly…uh…worrying decline of search. It feels like the order of their results can no longer be trusted, the web no longer reliably scraped. Instead, this essential...
I love this time of year for the satisfying blocks of website tinkering. There are big mornings and long afternoons spent with a new CSS feature. Or a whole weekend rewriting the about page, fixing dark mode, poking, prodding. Every...
Redesigning this website over the weekend gave me a curious feeling. It was a deeply cozy one, as if my work sits on a continuum of all the other websites and books every made. As if my work is a link in a long chain through time. You’ll...
Adventure games had all the best characters growing up. George Stobbart. Nico Collard. Guybrush Threepwood. Elaine Marley. Then a few decades later we got Harry Dubois and Kim Kitsuragi. I love adventure games because they consistently...
Have you played Viewfinder yet? I picked it up last night on a whim and I wasn’t prepared for how brilliantly designed and creative and straight-up weird it all is. Here’s the gist: the game is about solving little puzzles by taking...
Over the past couple of years I’ve noticed that 90% of my design feedback comes down to these three things: Ditch those words! Ditch those words! Ditch those words! It’s the fastest way to make a design more easily understood because...
There are books and then there are books. The kind where you can’t put down until they’re finished with you. The kind that captures every atom of your attention and changes something deep down. You walk away altered, the words having not...
It often feels like optimism is an act of revenge, an act of spite or rebellion, because optimism requires diligence and effort whilst pessimism feels like the default, the thing requiring no energy or effort. Mike Monteiro wrote along...
Long time, huh? Lately I’ve felt the need to lay low, to hush myself, to be as quiet as a door mouse. Whilst the world feels so very loud and brash and full of words, stepping away from the Infinite Word Machine that is the internet has...