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
Somehow I’ve found myself in a room bustling with all the languages of Europe—they’re mixing out in the dusty air around me; Dutch and German, Greek and French, others are arguing in Romanian (or perhaps Italian) whilst they nudge past...
Anita Sarkeesian writing for the NYT: In 2006, I was drawn back into video games when Nintendo introduced a new system with intuitive motion controls and a quirky name, Wii. Nintendo projected the message that this new console was for...
Erik Kwakkel on medieval deskstops and how they were designed specifically for reading: While it is easy to find images of scribes with a desk full of books, it is less common to encounter readers in similar situations. That is to say:...
William Weaver, the translator of many of Calvino’s books, wrote this great piece about his relationship with the author: Writers do not necessarily cherish their translators, and I occasionally had the feeling that Calvino would have...
Ross Andersen, an interview with Elon Musk ...a one-way trip to Mars could be a tough sell. It would be fascinating to experience a deep space mission, to see the Earth receding behind you, to feel that you were afloat between worlds, to...
Here’s a neat post from Sally Kerrigan, where she helps writers to make that sometimes terrifying rough draft: Now you just need to start putting your ideas on paper. Try not to reread until you absolutely have to, preferably on a...
Kathy Sierra, Trouble at the koolaid point: It begins with simple threats. You know, rape, dismemberment, the usual. It’s a good place to start, those threats, because you might simply vanish once those threats include your family....
Here’s an interesting post by Tobias Frere-Jones about naming typefaces and how this process has evolved over the ages: Years ago, I asked one of my mentors what he thought was the hardest part of designing a typeface. I was expecting...
“Every webpage is a latent community,” writes Clay Shirky in the most lucid piece of writing about Social Media™ that I’ve ever read. Yet despite its yawning blurb, Here comes everybody is not another book about the horrors of...
I do not think it is possible to feel empathy for 7 billion people. I know it is not possible to mourn the ~400,000 souls we lose to death every day on this planet earth. In a city like New York, it is not even reasonable to say Hi to...
I’m adding Peter Mendelsund’s book What we see when we read to the small pile of books that I’ll heartily recommend to everyone – it’s a meandering collection of thoughts about what happens during the act of reading. Unlike the title...
In recent weeks I’ve been trying to improve my fledging JavaScript skills, which have always bothered me. Sure, for the longest time I’ve been able to hack away in order to get something to work in the browser but parsing all the quirks...
For one reason or another I had entirely forgotten about Matthew Buttericks’ excellent book Practical typography which he published last year and asked readers to pay whatever they wanted for it afterwards. In his latest update he...
I get the impression that I’m not supposed to be here; the impassable language, the strange food, and my own fumbling terror as I accidentally stroll through the red light district at eight in the morning. These unfamiliar surroundings...
Nicole Fenton has posted her notes of an excellent talk she gave on how to improve copywriting for interfaces. Sadly though I often tend to neglect lots of this advice, for example the bit where Nicole writes: Don’t assume you’re the...