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
“Am I taking this seriously enough?” I ask myself. You know, ~this~; the words and the typing, the becoming-a-writer-slowly-over-time thing. I put pen to paper maybe a couple of times a week but do I spend hours a day writing in hopes of...
Here’s a video essay about “following people from afar on the Internet” called Fraidycat, which also happens to be the name of a desktop app and browser extension for following hundreds of people on whatever platform they’re on. If you...
Helen Macdonald’s novel H Is for Hawk is infuriating because it’s overwhelmingly kind and has just the sort of style that I often shoot for in Adventures. It hops and skips along, without a mean bone in its body. There’s so much momentum...
Here’s some good writing advice and tough love from Hugh Howey where he discusses being in a writing room for a TV show and how it applies to his work in books: I figured out a long time ago that it’s often better to delete entire...
Over the Christmas break I read a book about underground places called Underland where Robert Macfarlane investigates mines, caves, burial sites, and even ventures deep into the network of tunnels beneath Paris. For the most part I...
Dave Rupert mentioned the other day that he had made a page on his website that gathers his most recent favorites from Feedbin and lets you scroll through them or even subscribe to them. I thought this was such a great idea that I...
Dorian Taylor has written an outstanding piece about making software and project management. He rushes out of the gate with the following sentence: The Agile Manifesto is an immune response on the part of programmers to bad management. I...
This is an interesting and honest post by Craig Mod on how his paid membership program faired in 2019. He breaks down his costs and what advice he would give to other writers/artists who are interested in becoming more independent. I...
Paul wrote this lovely piece that riffs on my thoughts about why software is bad and the the cool thing about it? Paul disagrees with me! He argues in part that building great software will always require some degree of communication and...
Although I’ve argued before that software development is suffering from extreme mismanagement, I hadn’t thought much about how the structure of a company plays into the quality of the software; the way tasks are filtered down to...
Jonnie Hallman’s newly redesigned personal site is rather lovely as it’s sort of like a little essay all about him and his work. It’s the perfect introduction to the history of his web design and development career and I might steal a...
I love this story from Eric Meyer about building a website that looks as if it was from the 1900s and almost getting fired in the process: The young’uns in the audience won’t remember this, but to avoid loss of data and services when the...
I love this piece by Steve Klabnik on how to care for an open source community. He writes: ...without someone actively paying attention, it’s only a matter of time before things get unseemly. If you’re looking to help out an open source...
Kyle Chayka on the empty promise of minimalism and our obsession with it all: The iPhone’s function depends on an enormous, complex, ugly superstructure of satellites and undersea cables that certainly are not designed in pristine...
I reckon every good story begins halfway through. One example is the first scene of Uncharted 2: we don’t see our protagonist Nathan Drake at the train station buying his ticket, grabbing a coffee, hopping on the train, finding his seat,...