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
We’re not in Los Angeles, Ali reminds me for maybe the fiftieth time as she unlocks her phone and points to the map. “This bit is Orange County, this bit is LA.” She’s mad and tells me I’m an idiot yet somehow it’s a mark of respect, a...
The other day I was reading Craig Mod’s article all about the Future Book where he briefly mentioned Matt Taibbi’s latest venture: Hate, Inc. This is a newsletter published via Substack (that charges $40 for a yearly subscription) but...
For the past couple of days I’ve been using You Need A Budget, a web app that’s designed around a rather simple premise: every dollar you earn should have a job, whether that’s paying for dumb stuff like video games, or paying off...
After reading a few posts about browser diversity I realized that I need to put my money where my mouth is and make the switch to Firefox. And so, despite my initial hesitation, that’s what I did last week and actually I’m loving...
What troubles me most about Brexit, despite that abomination of a name, is the wasted intellectual, emotional, and creative resources that have been spent on it so far. Two years of doubt, anxiety, and arguments. For nothing. I sometimes...
David Crawshaw has a wondrous idea for a new type of search engine that doesn’t scan the commerical web and instead indexes indie blogs, podcasts, and art instead: What I miss is that I could "go on the internet" and be in a creative...
I really like how Andy Baio describes Quora’s practices as “isolationist” in this post about why you should never use their service: All of Quora’s value is derived from the answers provided by its users, and they go to great lengths to...
Chris Beard has written about all the drama surrounding Microsoft killing off EdgeHTML and he makes a lot of great points: Will Microsoft’s decision make it harder for Firefox to prosper? It could. Making Google more powerful is risky on...
I love this talk by Mina Markham all about her work on designing systems at Slack and Hillary for America. What I particularly love about this talk though is that Mina digs into what she screwed up along the way and how she fixed it. My...
In The Victorian Internet Tom Standage investigates how the telegraph was developed and how it changed the world. He writes about the laying of the Transatlantic submarine cables, the design of codes and the codebreakers, as well as the...
Today we published something over on CSS-Tricks that I’ve been thinking about over the past year or so. A lot of folks tend to think that front-end development is a problem to be solved with tools, processes, or frameworks. And I...
I’m reading Gary Kamiya’s Cool Gray City of Love at the moment which is an account of the history of San Francisco and it’s architecture, culture, and people. If you’re interested in the history of San Francisco then I’d certainly...
Over on CSS-Tricks I’ve written a bit about how we write CSS today at Gusto and how I’ve been thinking about the whole “functional vs. regular CSS” debate. I apologize profusely in advance for all the nuance because here’s the thing: I...
Nick Cave’s newsletter is called The Red Hand Files – he typically answers questions from his fans in an agony aunt fashion – and in one of the more recent entries he writes about recovering from tragedy: So how do we return to our lives...
Hannu Rajaniemi has made something marvelous; his latest novel Summerland is the best spy thriller I’ve read in years. The story is set in the early 20th century and in an alternative timeline where the British discovered the afterlife...