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 album by Emily Hopkins called Animal Crossing is a pure delight. If you like farming games or if you’d like to feel like you’re farming whilst you work then this is the absolute perfect album for you.
Somehow I had missed this excellent blog post from Reagan Ray about the lettering in Marvel comics: ...like most lettering, right around the late 90s, it all went to shit. The hand-lettering masterpieces were abandoned for fonts and...
A few weeks ago I ranted about RSS again: One of the neat things about RSS I’ve noticed is the number of times I walk away from it feeling awe instead of anger (basically 100% of the time). I think that’s because there’s no money in it,...
Ethan Marcotte wrote about why tech workers should unionize: The Basecamp story’s been a difficult one for me to follow. It’s a story about employees volunteering time to improve their workplace; it’s a story about racism and white...
New design day! Well, really it’s more of a typographic facelift with a few improvements to the homepage, but still. Why have I redesigned this here website? I guess for a while now I’ve felt that I want to push back against the grain of...
I love this post from Chris where he asks if CSS is a programming language and confronts it in a way I’ve always felt quietly but never put into words: I have a real distaste for this question. It might seem like a fun question to dig...
When you’re building an app you often want to know two things: why are things slow and what’s on fire? Or: how miserable are my users and where is that pain felt the most? That’s why we just shipped a host of improvements that should...
I love it when blog post titles are indecipherable to search engines. There are exceptions, like when you want to document a technical thing and so you should have a blog post title describe that but the majority of the time I feel like...
Mercure looks bloody lovely. Not entirely sure what it is that I like about it, besides it’s obvious elegance and quietness. I adore the capital, Trojan-esque characters and the shhhh-ness of the text when in long, bookish columns. I had...
I’m redesigning the homepage right now (it’s so dang hard introducing yourself on the web!) and I’m bumping into tons of weird, old decisions I made whilst writing the CSS maybe four or five years ago. I try hard not to rewrite things...
A few months ago I couldn't stop looking at a photograph. It was taken at Fort Riley in Kansas around 1918 and shows an enormous, cavernous room stacked full of patients lying on beds; soldiers stricken with the Spanish Flu. Hats, masks,...
This is something I have to keep reminding myself when it comes to design: don't think like a database. If the data or the back-end requires you to do something, it doesn't mean that's how users should think about a problem. It's a...
I wrote an email to Lucy over the weekend all about, well, email and the web: Anyway, I see HTML and CSS as a bridge—a set of languages and agreements between browsers that give us access to nigh-on everyone in the world. (And I think...
Here’s some nifty new fonts from Bold Monday: Puffin and Puffin Arcade, designed by Pieter van Rosmalen. I particularly like the Arcade variant since it’s not often that a font elicits a loud oooooo! when I see it for the first time....
“Dealing with fascism is an inevitable part of living alongside other people,” Carlos Maza argues in this excellent video called How To Be Hopeless. Maza compares fascism to a plague: This is what it means to fight a plague: it's rage,...