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’ve been thinking a lot about how the web is changing. Here’s Nilay Patel: There’s a theory I’ve had for a long time that I’ve been calling “Google Zero” — my name for that moment when Google Search simply stops sending traffic outside...
In the past I’ve watched designers hop from company to company every other year and thought to myself: Wow, what on earth are they doing? How can they possibly learn anything, how can they contribute anything meaningful to an...
Anil Dash: You might have noticed, it’s not a super fun time to be in the publishing industry, especially if you’re trying to do journalism. The years-long drumbeat of bad news issuing from nearly every newsroom has left people...
Jack Cheng: Fiction is a backdoor into a communal vision. A novel – maybe every novel – is a prototype of the future. And if the ideas that the tech industry is pursuing feel stagnant, feel from the same old paratactic lists, maybe it...
The other day our landlord walked into our apartment. Just opened the door right up and headed in. They were here to fix a problem we’d never heard about, and then they began to moan about the maintenance of the building. Oh, the upkeep!...
I’ve been doing a lot of interviews for designers lately so here’s a list of all the questions I’m asking along the way and maybe this helps someone out there looking for a design gig. Beware though! I have “failed” ten thousand design...
“Are you okay, dad?” It was 7am and I found him hunched over the table in the kitchen with papers scattered all over the place. His hair was frazzled and his neck was red. I guess he had been up writing all night, scribbling frantically...
Last week I ran a fun exercise: I wanted to take a week off work and build out The Cascade, the almost-weekly-ish newsletter that I’ve written about front-end development and CSS, and turn it into a full blow standalone...
I zipped through Better Onboarding by Krystal Higgins a few weeks ago and, in my mind, it’s a classic that should be required reading for anyone who makes software. I am serious! It is very good! I can’t remember the last time a book...
Writing is often seen as a tool for teaching or informing, lecturing atop a golden soapbox. But all the best writers I know don’t care much for writing as communication as much as they do writing for just heckin’ figuring things out or...
Two e-essays for your consideration! The first is Models All The Way Down by Christo Buschek and Jer Thorp. It’s all about LAION-5B and the enormous corpus of questionable data that’s used to train AI models under the hood. Here’s the...
DJR just released Indoor Kid, a new variable font for typesetting dialogue in comic books and there’s a bunch of lovely things to note about it. First, I love the idea of a type specimen being a comic book! Second, having an emphasis...
Whenever I’m in a room without a whiteboard I feel trapped. Perhaps this is just the way I have to think through a problem but I can’t breakdown ideas or solutions without a whiteboard or a glass window to draw on. In fact, I’d say that...
Elizabeth Goodspeed: I’ve come to believe that developing taste is not so unlike going to therapy; it’s an inefficient, time-consuming process that mostly entails looking inward and identifying whatever already moves you. It’s the...
Being on the other side of design systems now as a product designer is super interesting. I kinda hate the rules and regulations and nitpicking! And if I can’t lean into the system then I will fight against it with every fiber of my...