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
George Saunders on the art of fiction writing: A guy (Stan) constructs a model railroad town in his basement. Stan acquires a small hobo, places him under a plastic railroad bridge, near that fake campfire, then notices he’s arranged his...
Kory Stamper on the use of the word “shithole” by #45 and what it means for lexicographers: ...the American press has traditionally been loath to print unseemly language like cusswords in full, and this has been a problem for...
We published Tools for Thinking and Tools for Systems the other day and I reckon it’s the beginning of a much larger rant that’ll get round to writing one day. The gist of my argument is this: I think we’ve spent an awful amount of time...
I’ve read this piece about design by Dean Allen multiple times and yet I can’t appear to shake it. Every time I read it I find something new that perfectly summarizes that moment in my career. Here’s a list of design rules from the piece...
Before newsletters and social networks there was RSS, a tool that helped us keep up to date with our favorite websites. And it was relatively simple, too: through a web app such as Google Reader, you could effectively subscribe to...
In a lovely post about the relationship between fiction writing and machine learning, Robin Sloan discusses how he wrote songs for his novel Sourdough with the help of artificial intelligence. However, Robin has some issues with that...
Bond is a new conference set in San Francisco this March 9-10 that “examines how creators make a living through the internet.” I just picked up my tickets and yet I have no idea what to expect, besides the fact that this is a project by...
Waiting for the moment when it all goes to hell is exhausting. In a relationship, I mean. Each bad joke and every forgetful act, it all has to add up, right? I imagine it’s all counted in a ledger; every single one of their friends that...
I was chatting with my pal Jules Forrest earlier today—she happens to be one of the best designers and developers that I know—and she mentioned something really interesting that I’ve been rolling around in my head all day. We were...
Supposedly TinyLetter won’t be shutting down in 2018 but it seems like it’s being sunsetted and/or merged into the larger MailChimp suite of products. Although that’s probably okay for most TinyLetter fans I’ve always wanted to...
Ever since Brandon Smith’s post about how CSS is Awesome was published in mid-2017 I’ve been entirely obsessed with it. I think it puts into words something significant that hasn’t really been said before about the language: CSS is hard...
The other day the programmer Bret Victor released a series of private emails with Alan Kay (the famous computer scientist) where Alan discusses how we require public, unfettered research to truly innovate because businesses are trying to...
I can’t remember the last time I felt quite like this. There’s a sense that everything’s on track and progress is being made; my day to day work isn’t quite as scary as it was a year ago (in fact now I’m beginning to feel like this whole...
I really like this post by Jeremy Keith on the difference between under and over-engineering: Ubiquity; universality; accessibility—however you want to label it, it’s what lies at the heart of the World Wide Web. It’s the idea that...
Dorothy Thompson, writing in 1941 about a particularly terrifying game called Who Goes Nazi: It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would...