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 think the weird thing about newsletters is that they’re so...formal. It would make for a cruel and unusual punishment if I sent an email out to a bunch of people that was nonsensical, doesn’t conclude properly, doesn’t have some sense...
Type designers often use pangrams (a sentence with every letter of the alphabet in it) to design their letters and “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is undoubtedly the most famous. It’s supposed to be an easy way to see if...
Herb Lubalin and his studios created a vast number of logos over the years. In a career that spanned over 40 years, Lubalin easily created over a hundred marks. Some were corporate logos, some were for non-profits, some were merely tight...
There’s a lot of nifty things you can do with variable fonts. You can make small design adjustments, or you can get a bunch of performance benefits...kinda. If you load a giant variable font with a ton of different axes then your users...
I wish blogging was easier. I reckon that 95% of the reason why people don’t write more on the Internet, on their own little spot with their own URL, is that it’s just a pain. The other day Tejas Kumar showed just how easy it is to...
This gig is about throwing all the toys on the floor and making a giant mess before slowly putting everything into labelled buckets, separating some things, subcategorizing others, binning the trash that needs to go. It’s all about...
With my new gig at Sentry I’ve returned to product design again as I hope to move as far away from design systems for as long as I can. Buttons and colors and fonts will catch up to me eventually, as they always do, but for the moment I...
Helena Fitzgerald made some lovely notes about her favorite band: Most of the things we love are the things that embarrass us. [...] I had never loved a band like I loved this band, and the truth is I never really have since. I...
This talk by John Roderick is still outstanding. Dammit, ugh! I remember sitting in the audience that year and swooning the whole way through this thing (you can actually see me in the video sat next to two people I love and at one point...
San Francisco is now warmer with each passing day, the winter chill almost tuned out from the evenings. It’s the sort of weather that I completely adore, the very cusp between winter and summer, and it’s the reason why I can’t imagine...
Seraph is equal parts stately and weird—it’s a new type family from Bernd Volmer and the specimen site happens to be simply outstanding. This is mostly thanks to the wide range of styles available; from slab, sans, wedge, tuskan, and...
This week was mostly good. It’s hard to say that during the pandemic (to care about your own well-being seems so very selfish). But the daily exercise is helping me concentrate and be a bit more upbeat. Although...the weigh in was...
Here’s Maciej Cegłowski on why we should wear a mask when walking around in public: In countries like Taiwan and Japan, even before this pandemic started, it was common for people to put on a mask on at the first sign of a cold, or to...
I’ve been listening to Planet Hearth by Calibre relentlessly over the past couple of days and I’ve found it to be excellent web-surfing and work music. It’s more gentle than Calibre’s previous stuff. Last night I was listening to it...
I like this bit from an interview with Ted Chiang: ...traditional “good vs. evil” stories follow a certain pattern: the world starts out as a good place, evil intrudes, good defeats evil, and the world goes back to being a good place....