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’m reading this post on the value of time by Paul Ford again and dammit it’s the sort of writing that makes me reel with envy: The only unit of time that matters is heartbeats. Even if the world were totally silent, even in a dark room...
At Gusto we’ve been building our design system for the past two years and thinking about how to scale our product and design process across multiple complex projects and teams. So whether you’re just starting out building a complicated...
This piece by Kai Stinchcombe on why blockchain is a terrible idea is pretty dang quotable—he tackles the crazy idea that blockchain is a magical technology wand that you can wave around and solve the “trust problem” between groups of...
Here’s some advice for designers that are interested in front-end development, product design and systems design work (or in other words, designers that do design for other designers): Don’t get preachy. No-one likes it when you’re...
I loved one of the recent episodes of the podcast Track Changes about how the web has changed and, namely, how the construction of ideas and work has become a commercialized experienced on the web. Okay, that was a very clunky sentence....
There’s an unforgettable moment in the novel Tigerman by Nick Harkaway which, even over the course of several years, has been impossible for me to shake. The moment is this one: our protagonist, Sergeant Lester Ferris, is on the brink of...
Over the past week or so I’ve been reading Spineless which is a book by Juli Berwald all about jellyfish. I picked it up in the Haight only because of the design of its cover and the random paragraph that I flipped to – but that would be...
I’m not a fan of Wes Anderson movies. I mean I love the style and the songs and the acting of course but the plot always falls a little short. At one point or another in the movie everyone will start talking as if they’re reading the...
Last night I watched the new documentary about Garry Shandling by Judd Apatow and I hadn’t quite expected to fall in love with it as much as I did. Quite frankly, it swept me off my feet. There’s so much that I adore about the film – the...
Anil Dash on the early promise of the web: For the first few years of the web, the fundamental way that people learned to build web pages was by using the “View Source” feature in their web browser. You would point your mouse at a menu...
I think, of all things, I miss her voice the most. I've been thinking about this a lot over the last week or so but when we were together I would see her not as a person with a beautiful smile or with any other mesmerizing physical...
I first came across this passage in Artful by Ali Smith that I finished just last week and it’s an unforgivably good quote extracted from Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. I haven’t read the book yet, but I believe that in this section the...
The night before the breakup, last night actually, I had a dream about our trip to Lake Tahoe. I was stood at the edge of the water, on the pier we had sat on only a few months before, and I was looking over the edge, down into its...
There’s a song by Jonwayne called Green Light where towards the end Anderson Paak takes the reins and sings one of my favorite lines. Well, sort of. In his mild mannered and eloquent style he says that “the stars align and my God...” but...
In Ali Smith’s Artful there’s this lovely description of what literature and form are capable of (as I understand it, form is how a sentence is structured and how it sounds as you say it out loud): For even if we were to find ourselves...