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
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,...
Katy wrote about how to detect 404s with Sentry: her team set up an alert to shout at them when more than 10 users see the same 404 path in a week. That's pretty neat! Katy writes: Since introducing Sentry to our 404 page, nearly two...
I loved this episode of the Rework podcast about the release of HEY World. Here’s how it works: once you've signed up for a HEY email account you can then send an email to world@hey.com. Your message will become a webpage (like a blog...
Louche is a striking typeface and John Boardley has the scoop: In 2019, Joona graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in Den Haag with a Masters in Type Design. It was during the course that the idea for Louche was born. Joona wondered...
I’m obsessed with work. It’s the first thing I wake up with in the morning and it’s the last thing I think of before I fall asleep. Well, “sleep” wouldn’t be fair because it’s a shattered, partial, broken half-trance that I slip into...
So I was wrong about that piece by Jason Farago — it's definitely not inspired by Newsletters at all. Just a quick search for his other pieces show one from November 2020 and earlier. So I'm not an inspiration, huh? Outrageous! Jokin’...
This is a shockingly beautiful thing by Jason Farago about art and power. Everything about this piece is a delight: the design of the site, the looking-closely-until-it-hurts, the pace and momentum of the writing. Jason writes about art...
Lucy wrote a great piece about the good days: On the good days, everything feels connected—a giant wall of conspiracy string. But on the bad days, every gesture and thought sits in isolation. It’s like I’m looking at the same board, but...
Alberto Manguel in The Library at Night: One of the lost plays of Sophocles is The Loves of Achilles, copies of which must have perished one after another, century after century, destroyed in pillaging and fires or excluded from library...