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
Robin Sloan on his novel Sourdough and the author M.F.K Fischer for FSG: And for me, voice is the thing. In a novel, I will forgive any flaw, overlook any omission, if the voice on the page has that sizzling Tesla-coil energy. A book in...
Jared Spool on the harmful measurement of NPS, the metric that many businesses use, especially in the Bay Area, to define customer satisfaction: We can’t reduce user experience to a single number this is the biggest flaw of NPS. It tries...
I can’t stop thinking about this piece by Jiayang Fan for the New Yorker all about obsession and celebrity worship and Chinese social networks: In China, he felt, it is still possible for celebrity worship to capture the entire culture....
Joe Fassler on writing, focus and disconnecting from the web: As twenty-first-century first-world humans, our first act in the morning is to check our phones—the nineteenth-century word we use to familiarize the glowing portals we carry...
This is just the sort of thing she would hate. Sentimentality, high fives, and any sort of public boasting is not her style and after finding out that I wrote something as nostalgic and emotional like this about her then she’s very...
Andrew Winston writing for Ev’s blog: ...consider the way so many Americans talk about government, like it’s some external group. It’s bizarre. We are government — it’s our shared responsibility. Our neighbors, friends, family, and...
Shakespeare was not a genius. He was, without the distant shadow of a doubt, the most wonderful writer who ever breathed. But not a genius. No angels handed him his lines, no fairies proofread for him. Instead, he learnt techniques, he...
At Gusto I’ve been working on a spreadsheet interface that’s a little complicated and elaborate but it got me to wondering how we might build the simplest responsive spreadsheet possible with nothing more than CSS and so I wrote about it...
The other day Tim Brown noticed that this old post had been deleted and so I rescued it from the Wayback Machine. It’s a post from several years ago where I wrote about a new typesetting system that we had developed at Erskine. Please...
The Biodiversity Heritage Library has made a huge stock of archival illustrations and imagery available on Flickr, as Josh Jones mentions in Open Culture: The first stream, currently at 122,281 images, has been carefully curated, and...
Ali Smith’s potent and luminous novel How to be both has been sitting on my desk for several days as I wait to return to it and write something even remotely coherent. But I realize now that will be impossible: How to be both is the...
The NYT has a great post about Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey, but here’s a snippet of the opening lines of the poem from a real good thread that I can’t stop thinking about: Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me...
The more I learn about design, and the more experienced I become in the field, the frequency with which people ask for this sort of advice increases: Can you review my code? How can I improve the UX of this feature? How would we...
A moment; brief, and fabulously memorable. Three of us were sat in a restaurant in the Haight enjoying drinks and a fine bookish conversation when it struck me: this was a moment that I’ll remember for the rest of my life. It’s not as...
Helena Fitzgerald on kudzu, money, sex and the color green: I look for greens, teasing them out of photos, trusting them too much when I find them, giving far too much credit to any place that will offer me the greatest possible...