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
Ethan Marcotte’s talk at New Adventures is very well much worth your time if you care for the web. Ethan broadens the scope of what accessibility means and argues that it goes beyond writing good HTML and CSS. It’s about making a web,...
Facing a three day break over the Memorial Day weekend, it dawned on me: it was time to redesign this website. Not the visuals or design, as I don’t believe in redesigning personal websites like that. Instead, I needed to rethink how I...
I’ve made a mistake, a lifelong one, correlating advancements in technology with progress. Progress is the opening of doors and the leveling of opportunity, the augmentation of the whole human species and the protection of other species...
Hey maybe the reason why accessibility is getting worse and the web is breaking is because folks still think that writing CSS and HTML is “lite” coding. Hey maybe the way we fix the web is by paying front-end engineers the same as...
I’ve had a lot of questions lately about what I do for a living. Not just from my family and friends but also, heck, even a few managers that I work with at Gusto. In general there’s a lot of folks who ask me what my job is and appear to...
Every company has a Judgement Day. Once in a while the peer reviews will roll in, the managers will require a self-evaluation, and you will be Judged. No matter what you do you’ll be assigned a rating, a number, a metric, and your job...
Anna Wiener writing for the New Yorker on what’s happening with Twitter and Jack Dorsey’s failure to respond to the community: The struggle to maintain Twitter is a double referendum: first, on the sustainability of scale; second, on the...
If you love sci-fi then you should read Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky immediately. A while back I wrote a bit about why it’s my favorite sci-fi novel of all time but it was only today that I read the afterword by Boris,...
I just re-read this piece from Ethan Marcotte all about design systems and how it’s kinda easy to forget that a system is really a collection of tools, and if those tools aren’t working then that’s a problem: Let’s say you, a...
Marcin Wichary has written yet another outstanding piece about how the team at Figma has redesigned how they treat line-height and spacing. But I can’t stop thinking about this bit where Marcin writes: The history of web design can be...
A while ago I wrote a piece for the folks at Figma all about one of the best ways to evangelize your design system: pairing with designers and engineers. And in that piece I collected a ton of thoughts over the last year or so doing this...
It’s about five minutes before we start shouting about Brexit. I find myself sat in the car, my brother driving me and my dad through the glorious mountain ranges and valleys of Wales. It’s the sort of landscape to make it appear as if...
Dave gathered some thoughts around blogging the other day and I agree with a lot of them but especially this one: If you ever sit down to write and the words don’t come out, don’t write. Close the computer. Do something else. This had me...
Douglas Preston investigates the oldest murder mystery on the planet when he takes a meandering and jolly wander about the extinction of the dinosaurs and almost all life on earth. Douglas writes in a way that is both poetic and teeming...
I’m hoofing it around London today preparing some last minute things for my visa. The weather could not be more beautiful as puffy little clouds float above me in a cerulean blue playground. But as I walk around I’m entirely reliant on...