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
Alex Russell: Frameworkism is now the dominant creed of frontend discourse. It insists that all user problems will be solved if teams just framework hard enough. This is non-sequitur, if not entirely backwards. In practice, the only...
I wouldn’t have become a designer if it wasn’t for CSS3 and HTML5. They came together at just the right time and captured everything that was so exciting about publishing and typography on the web. And I was drawn towards the web because...
This is the longest streak of not-writing in years. It’s impossible to know what to say, impossible to describe the disappointment and frustration over the last few weeks. Right now it feels best to be quiet so I’ve thrown myself into my...
Erin Kissane has started a new research studio with the most punk URL I’ve ever seen: wrecka.ge. Get out of here! That’s fantastic. But also everything about this project is, as Erin writes: We need new networks that genuinely work...
Great piece by Gareth Edwards about the soon-to-be defunct .io domain and a wild story about colonialism, borders, and the internet: In 2006, Montenegro declared independence from Serbia. With the digital revolution now firmly underway,...
I’m in New York this week for a work thing, stationed close to the Empire State building. The last time I was here it was almost a decade ago and...I didn’t have a great time. Actually, I haven't liked New York the three times I’ve been...
Mandy Brown wrote this fantastic piece about building a space on the web for yourself: A website is, among other things, a container. The shape of that container both constrains and makes possible what goes within it. This is, I think,...
Every problem at every company I’ve ever worked at eventually boils down to “please dear god can we just hire people who know how to write HTML and CSS.” This UX is awful? That UI looks old? Accessibility busted? Performance bad? Design...
Matt Webb just added a new feature to his website called cursor party: If you’ve visited my actual website, rather than reading by email or whatever, such as reading this very post, you may notice somebody else’s cursor pass by as you’re...
In the year of our lord 2024 it feels so very antiquated that there’s separate licenses for web and desktop fonts. Every project I work on requires both font formats and I know there’s business reasons why a type foundry might make those...
Sarah Jeong: We briefly lived in an era in which the photograph was a shortcut to reality, to knowing things, to having a smoking gun. It was an extraordinarily useful tool for navigating the world around us. We are now leaping headfirst...
Nolen Royalty writes about his wondrous One Million Checkboxes project, and how something very peculiar happened: A few days into making One Million Checkboxes I thought I’d been hacked. What was that doing in my database? A few hours...
Here’s a lovely monospaced font by Helena Zhang that’s worth checking out. It has just the right amount of charm and charisma, but it’s still readable at small sizes. I’m downloading this thing immediately. Also: Departure Mono is a...
Last night I finished Moonbound, Robin Sloan’s latest novel, and now I am deeply, thoroughly annoyed that there aren’t seven of them lined up already for me to blitz through. I demand EarthBound, SeaBound, SpaceBound! This is the kind of...
There’s this scene in Halt and Catch Fire that I think about all the time. Lee Pace (played by me) walks into an empty office with his business pal and smiles at all the emptiness. “Look,” Lee says, pointing across the room towards a...