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
This is a sharp and brilliant piece by Andrew Flowers. He looks at the current research behind universal basic income, where the government would effectively cut social benefits and replace them with a single wage for both rich and poor...
Chris messed around with a famous essay by Leonard E. Read called I, Pencil and I love it so much: How are these words delivered to you? Massive networks of wires! Fiber-optic undersea cables line all the oceans and seas and grip the...
After a rather unfortunate set of circumstances, which I’ll make sure to write about soon, I’m now available for contract web design and front-end development work. From now until late May 2016 I want to work on as many projects as...
You might be familiar with the fog of war. This is how designers obscure sections of the video game world until one of the characters has stepped through it. The idea is to build a sense of tension and adventure; the fog supplies the...
Yesterday Adam Morse wrote about webfonts, which, well...the gist is that webfonts are bad for usability and performance so we should effectively ditch them: I’ve heard a lot of arguments about why to use webfonts. In none of those...
In all the excitement of recent months I forgot to mention that a couple of weeks ago we finished work on an update to The Outpost website. Blend modes! Viewport units! object-fit magic! This teaser combines a lot of the techniques that...
I wrote up a quick overview of two of my favourite CSS properties lately. I’ve found that in general day-to-day interface design that I keep returning to these new methods to manipulate inline images and so I thought someone else might...
Paul Ford describes the early days of the web: Then along came HTML, and what I remember most was that sense of being back inside the file. Sure, HTML was a typographic nightmare, a bunch of unjustified Times New Roman in 12 pt on...
For the past year I’ve been trying to get my freelance business off the ground and thanks to Cushion it’s been an awful lot less stressful and terrifying than it might have been otherwise. Cushion is an app for organising a freelancer’s...
From the archives of iA, Putting Thought Into Things: Listening is a masochist endeavor. To do it right you have to put everything down. Not just your phone, even pen and paper. There is nothing to hold on to when you just listen. You...
I’ve been listening to the interviews on Longform over the past week—in between cleaning, working, heading to the gym—and they’ve been so consistently insightful. Here are my favourites so far: George Saunders on ‘the long corridor’ and...
Here’s an article I wrote for CSS-Tricks where I discuss all the benefits and troublesome problems of the new font format that Nick Sherman mentioned at Ampersand: I think there’s huge potential for a new variable font format to become a...
Micah Lee on his work regarding the Snowden revelations: Working in Tails to remain anonymous while I developed the site, however, meant that this would be trickier than the web development I’d done in the past. I didn’t have access to...
Over on CSS-Tricks I've written an intro to font loading and discussed the problems with the Flash of Unstyled Text approach that many designers today still prefer: Several years ago the consensus on font loading in the community was...
This year’s Ampersand was a perfect cavalcade of typographic misadventures which has left me buzzing with ideas. First up was Indra Kupferschmid’s fascinating talk about web typography and I jotted down a couple of useful points she made...