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
Over the weekend I read this great collection of advice for writers by Anne Lammot called Bird by Bird. The goal of this short little book is to help young writers learn more about the design and publication of fiction but, aside from...
Over on A List Apart Allen has written an interesting piece about how to make sure that the aging content on our websites isn’t left out to pasture unnecessarily. ...for years, we’ve neglected the disciplines of stewardship—the invisible...
Reading is designed to alleviate our curiosity. We all want to know what’s in our neighbors’ pockets, how they style their hair, how much time they spent on the rusty machine in their garage, or how long and serious their last...
Whilst you’re writing it’s entirely possible to throw everything away and start again if you don’t like how things are working out. If the tone is too harsh or your voice is too light, a quick adjustment can tighten the bolts. Likewise...
From a distance across an ocean, across a network, what inspired me about Chloe was her unrelenting curiosity and kindness. Through her writing I began my little hobby of making playlists every month whilst thinking about owning, as she...
It’s been one hell of a gif-fueled ride, but today is my last at Erskine. When I joined almost two years ago I thought that Git was an English slang and I didn’t know anything about Sass, JavaScript or responsive design. Fresh out of...
In a short story called ‘To Reiterate’ from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis the author wonderfully describes her personal experiences of reading, writing and traveling whilst also taking apart dumb quotations and pithy statements in...
For the longest time I’ve taken the sidelines in most arguments, both online and in daily conversations with strangers. I believed that trying to correct the facts or convince people of my own argument was futile and, in some ways, kind...
Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian: How to ward off atrophy and routine, you ask? Well, I can give you a small and perhaps ridiculous example. Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page....
Madness, Rack and Honey is a collection of lectures by the poet Mary Ruefle in which she contemplates the various struggles surrounding her art, and gosh darn it if this book isn’t endlessly quotable. I haven’t been able to put it down...
Lately I’ve been reading a fabulous string of novels yet it’s made me feel a little guilty about ignoring the more science-oriented and fact-driven prose out there. So I’ve been making my first tentative steps into the field of physics...
Earlier this week I headed off to the Future of Web Design conference in London to give a talk about systems, language and maintainable interface design which was adapted from an essay I wrote back in December called A Visual Lexicon....
The weeks leading up to a speaking event my nerves will inevitably begin to shake; I bite my lip uncontrollably, my mood swings from ecstatic to horrified and back again, whilst sleep becomes entirely out of the question. Soothing these...
Whirls of color and texture flipped by, one after another, up on the projector in front of us. Pitch-perfect typographic settings and illustrative allusions were printed onto these book covers, each striking the balance between...
Last week I wrote about an interesting method for setting type by using a brand new feature in Sass 3.3 called maps. This essentially lets you store lots of data in nested lists which can then be accessed via a mixin or a function. In...