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
Lucy and I were texting about The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde by the Arion Press the other day (it’s perhaps the most beautiful book I’ve seen in years). The shocker here is the price tag though: each book is $680! Wait, nope: that’s just...
Since I had a terrifying dentist appointment the other day I needed something to listen to whilst I clenched my fists in absolute terror. And that’s when I realized that I hadn’t listened to Web History yet, originally written by Jay...
This is dumb, but hear me out: what if there was an equivalent of Google’s Web Vitals but for design systems? What if you could look at a report that showed precisely how bad your design system was and what you needed to fix right away?...
When folks talk about design systems they often mention developer productivity (ew), or consistency (better), or accessibility (best). However, one thing folks don’t talk about often is what a good design system feels like. A good design...
Right now I feel like there’s no browser built just for me. All the options today are bloated, big, clunky; I reckon they’re all trying to do too much. Booting up Chrome today feels like moving a starship into orbit and being blasted by...
C bought a typewriter and hid it in her car. Each week she’d drive out to her parents’ house without telling me and, under this veil of secrecy, she’d type out messages on little cards. On each of them she’d write a joke, a memory, a...
Here’s a great piece—wonderfully written and expertly illustrated with maps—about how climate change is going to effect houses and beaches in the Hamptons: “Are we going to take this opportunity to reenvision the way we live with water,...
I love the look of this: Occupant Oldstyle by Cyrus Highsmith and and June Shin. It’s a perfect addition to the Occupant Fonts library; Oldstyle is playful and silly—look at that Q!—and yet seriously constructed—look at the numbers! The...
Rutherford Craze on the design of MD Nichrome: …something I think about a lot in my work is the idea of the technology gap. When a creative work moves from one medium to another, not every part of it survives the transition: the digital...
For the CSS-Tricks newsletter, I wrote a bit about all the weird browsers I’ve been seeing lately: ...it feels like there’s something in the air when it comes to browsers. Folks are starting to think about them differently and that’s...
White Tears kicked my ass and it’s impossible to describe why. I read it in three or four big gulps this week but it’s so good that I’m still in a deep fit of despair about just how good it all was. It’s a novel by Hari Kunzru about...
Here’s a beautiful book called the Manual of Diacritics by Radek Sidun. Diacritics are those peculiar shapes above and below characters that are mostly absent in English—façade and naïve are those rare leftovers—but these marks are...
Adam J Calhoun: Inspired by a series of posters, I wondered what did my favorite books look like without words. Can you tell them apart or are they all a-mush? In fact, they can be quite distinct. Take my all-time favorite book, Absalom,...
Jim Nielsen on removing the hurdles to blogging: If the goal of your blog is to blog, i.e. to write and publish, then start by removing everything that gets in the way of that goal. Eschew anything beyond writing the content of a post....
Willy Staley wrote a piece about The Sopranos and captured why it’s so gosh darn good: Biederman argued that the show is, at its heart, about the bathetic nature of decline. “Decline not as a romantic, singular, aesthetically...