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 keep returning to Craig Mod’s fervent, potent ideas on what it means to be a part of the web, both as a citizen and as a large publisher: All I know is the more I read digitally, the more this feeling — the strange joy of adding to the...
An alluring, essential talk called Big data, no thanks from James Bridle: This is the first electronic general-purpose computer, the ENIAC, which was built at the University of Pennsylvania between 1941 and 1946. It was used extensively...
(One remembers involuntarily and with goosebumps that in 1876–78, Edward Robert Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, First Earl of Lytton GCB GCSI GCIE PC (to whom, incidentally, Lady Windermere’s Fan was dedicated), serving as the Viceroy of India,...
William Zinsser's classic On Writing Well contains outstanding advice for writers, but the part I constantly think about is the section on editing: Learn to enjoy this tidying process. I don't like to write; I like to have written. But I...
I'm in love with this short story by Borges: No, he replied. Then, as if confiding a secret, he lowered his voice. “I acquired the book in a town out on the plain in exchange for a handful of rupees and a Bible. Its owner did not know...
When an alcoholic describes their inexorable lust I realise it's precisely how I would describe my relationship with Food. Unlike drinking or smoking however, I still have to eat Food everyday. And not as a guilty compulsion, but as a...
A while back I had the pleasure of joining Charles Peters and Tom Carmony on a special episode of Viewsources all about typography and design. We talked about our favourite type systems, how to get started in the industry and how to make...
It’s the final day of XOXO and I’m sat under a canopy watching the prolonged withdrawal of a beautiful evening — shadows flitter their way across skin left bare by shorts and dresses as everyone has now gathered outside after the talks....
In Making charts with CSS over on CSS-Tricks I take a look at a few interesting ways to make bar charts, sparklines and pie charts without resorting to a JavaScript framework. Using JS isn’t necessarily a problem here but sometimes we...
I’m starting a newsletter called Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan and Derelict where I’ll begin to publish a short story once every other week. This is a place to help me learn how to write dialogue and think about character development and...
Since my early childhood I believed that I was a New Yorker in exile. The atmosphere, the energy; I gobbled up every part of it that leaked through a TV or found its way to me via magazines, posters and books. I felt that not only had I...
I’ve been obsessed with blend modes over the past couple of weeks. First it started when I noticed how the Almanac was missing both mix-blend-mode and background-blend-mode so I went ahead and fixed that. Even though I’d been through the...
Working on a project with a styleguide for the first time is encouraging me to document my code a lot more than I usually do. It’s also surprising to reveal how little I truly understand about the complexities of CSS and writing code for...
It’s been eleven weeks of these little notes and so much has changed over that time. I’m not really sure who’s reading them but hey these are really just for me to push myself to getting stuff done each week. In fact it’s sort of...
This week I was recovering from a fever/cold/nightmare illness that left me with an awful lot of email and unfinished tasks ready for next week so unfortunately nothing much happened of note. I did help write a primer on BEM though; it...