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 just hopped off an eleven hour flight from San Francisco and I feel like I’ve drunk a couple bottles of wine by myself. I’m waiting for my hotel room to open up so I can crawl under the bed, roll up into a ball, and sleep for an...
The strangest thing about front-end development is that it’s such a rare collection of skills that happen to be so undervalued today. You want accessibility? You need front-end engineers. You want performance? You need front-end...
This post by Kelly Sutton all about how a new technology is rarely the solution to our problems is my new favorite thing: Lately at work, I’ve found myself being a particularly conservative and sometimes curmudgeonly voice in the room...
I wrote up some opinions I have about design systems and portfolios for CSS-Tricks: In my experience working with design systems, I’ve found that I have to sacrifice my portfolio to do it well. Unlike a lot of other design work where...
Here’s an opinion without any facts or evidence: I only care about making the design system 1% better every day. If that means deleting a bit of code that doesn’t have any impact whatsoever then that’s okay. If it means changing the font...
I’ve been working on our UI Kit at Gusto for a couple of months now – this is a project in Figma that lets other designers on our team examine our components and get a better picture of what’s available to use in their own designs....
I would heartily recommend Roadside Picnic. It’s a sci-fi novel written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and the book’s premise is a wonderful if not entirely ghoulish one: aliens land on Earth but leave without contacting us. In their...
I often think of this passage from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities where Marco Polo is talking to Kublai Khan about how to approach difficult problems: ...the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are...
In his first week at SingleTrac, a video game company that made cult classics like Twisted Metal, Jay Barnson discovered the “black triangle” – a way of describing problems that are giant in engineering scope but don’t tend to be all...
One of the hardest parts about design systems work is that you have to treat it all like designing a blog – the work requires tiny, incremental improvements that build up over time instead of giant reinventions of the wheel that never...
I absolutely adore this post by Matthew Ström about what design systems really are and why they’re so difficult to make. Matthew writes: With beautiful design systems like Polaris, Lightning, and Carbon for inspiration, it’s tempting to...
Over on Typographica, the type designer Agyei Archer has written a wonderful piece about fascism and type design: The quiet act of knowingly using a typeface designed by a supporter of fascism, and then vigorously defending that...
I love this sentiment from Violet Peña on getting her own blog off the ground: [...] here I am, ten months later, with a still-flawed but productive site, a site which lets me express myself, spread knowledge, and hone my writing skills....
Tim Carmody happens to be one of my favorite writers and he’s just set up a newsletter over at Substack where he’s going to be writing the Amazon Chronicles each week. This beat will cover everything about Amazon – from their ambitions...
I love this post by Cap Watkins on the traits and values of the boring designer: The boring designer realizes that the glory isn’t in putting their personal stamp on everything they touch. In fact, most of the time, it’s about leaving no...