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 still come back to this post by Merlin Mann called Making the Clackity Noise, years after I first read it, where he asks us all to write a little bit about our lives every day. Like small things; what we’re struggling with today, what...
After more than a year of working on Adventures in Typography, a weekly newsletter that I write about typography and design, I’ve figured out what it is or really what I want it to be. And so now I thought it’s as good a time as any to...
There’s this troubling belief when just starting out as a writer that your favorite texts aren’t just bits of paper strung together but are instead works of art; ethereal and everlasting. This is constantly reinforced in popular culture,...
I often think about a post that Mandy Brown wrote way back in 2009 called Ways of Reading. In that post Mandy argues that we should “always read with a pen in hand” and “think of the text as the starting point for your own words” –...
Robin Sloan’s Sourdough is a precious thing. It’s a novel set in the Bay Area about the making of a mysterious bread and the programming of an artificial intelligence for a robotic hand. I would mention something more about the...
I’ve been reading James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time over the past week and it’s surprising to me that I don’t find his work as celebrated as it ought to be. I’ve watched some of his debates and read a couple of his books and each time...
Ta-Nehisi Coates on the American Civil War and Confederate, the new tv show by HBO: For while the Confederacy, as a political entity, was certainly defeated, and chattel slavery outlawed, the racist hierarchy which Lee and Davis sought...
My desk faces west towards the Sutro Tower and to be quite honest I only picked this apartment because of the tower and how it looms above Twin Peaks (those lumpy bumpy ridges above). As soon as I walked in the front door I knew that...
Jer Thorp on data systems and how bias, whether intentional or not, affects the representation of that data: Whenever you look at data — as a spreadsheet or database view or a visualization, you are looking at an artifact of such a...
Tim Maly on the election: I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit hanging around the online communities of the kind of people we are worried about reaching here, and I am here to tell you: They are using their critical thinking...
What’s your favorite website? Which is the one above all the others that you think about from time to time? In fact, which website do you not only think about but obsess over? I don’t want you to think about which website is the most...
Writing for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Alan Toner describes the current state of advertising on the web and criticizes Google for not just allowing but almost encouraging advertisers to surveil users on the web: Ad quality needs...
A train. A tunnel. Oakland. Walking in the dim light. A bar. Paper (a book). Beer. Basketball on the screen. A small crowd. An argument at the other end of the bar. Singing outside. A birthday. An hour or two. Hannah. A smile. Hugging....
Ingrid Burrington is one of my favorite writers and here she’s jotted down notes from a talk she made on data centers and power: When I’ve gone on data center tours I know most of this security theater isn’t really for me, but there is a...
Philip Smith made a lovely recording of him playing piano, but the story behind the recording is just as charming as the music itself: Yesterday, on my way home, I went into a bar-restaurant I'd never been into before. There was a goat...