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
The biggest threat to great design is bias. For example: at Sentry I’m on the Workflow team. We work on the error monitoring side of things, such as Alerts and Issues. These features notify you when a user experiences a problem with your...
Just look at this enormous woodblock illustration by Albrecht Dürer made in 1515. From The Met archives: The Arch of Honor is the artistic summation of Emperor Maximilian I’s ambitions. Combining elements from many of his other...
I imagine reading the blog of my grandmother: What did she do on her thirtieth birthday? How did she feel when she met my mom? What did she struggle with? Who did she love? What did her voice sound like? The other day Donny Trương asked...
On the subject of design engineers that’s been getting some attention in the front-end community lately (yes I am quoting myself, shut up): The problem (which I didn’t realize at the time) was that the organization I worked for was...
Austin riffed on that bit I wrote about how blogging is pointing at things and falling in love—but!—he takes it one step further when he writes what good writing is: Point at things, say, “whoa,” and elaborate. Gosh I love that. And I...
Lewis Mcguffie, the designer of Columba, wrote this piece about designing with scale in mind: Something will always be in the shadows, or even behind a hill, we may be colour-blind, or a thing may simply be too small to see (the list is...
Marc wrote about why he still uses RSS: I've already spoken before about my general disinterest with Social Media but it wasn't until somewhat recently that I decided to really start looking for alternatives - searching for a better way...
Someone sent me an email the other week and wrote this line that I’ve been thinking about ever since: How to talk deeply about a subject but carry yourself lightly? I have no idea how to do this—to talk about Big and Serious things...
This post from John Boardley called Inventing Posters is worth every minute of your time. He looks at the history of engraving, drypoint, and etching illustrations: Just as the printing press brought knowledge and books to the entire...
Tom MacWright writes about the current landscape of reading on the web today: Books are amazing, but the options we have to buy books and track our reading are terrible. A lot of us are locked into the Amazon ecosystem - buying books on...
Derek Thompson: But the costs of hygiene theater are greater than dry hands for paranoid people. First, it’s absorbing precious resources. Urban-transit authorities have spent hundreds of millions of dollars blasting their subways and...
The other day I linked to Maciej Cegłowski’s talk about success and remarkably it’s not filled with stuff like “just wake up earlier, you poor idiots” which so many self-help talks are really saying. There’s a point in the talk I haven’t...
Robin made a few adjustments to The Society of the Double Dagger and the new format is great: he’s split up this newsletter into all sorts of micro-newsletters that you can pick and choose from. Not only that, but he’s also going to...
Craig is back to talk about year three of Special Projects where he describes how this subscription service is working out for him so far: A membership program should be seen as an accelerant for work you must do. That is, it should be...
When I look back on work from five or six years ago—heck, I don’t even have to go back that far—I see it clearly now: a few extra sentences here, another repetitive chunk of stuff over there. I’m so desperate to impress and swoon, so...