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
Typographica has once again published a collection of reviews about last year’s type releases and so I’ll be spending the next couple of days carefully bookmarking and reading each of them in turn. This is one of my favourite annual...
Last weekend I finally picked up Inside Paragraphs, a book by the illustrator and type designer Cyrus Highsmith. Essentially the book is a primer into the typesetter’s world, with the succinct writing being wonderfully complemented by...
Written by the prolific Alberto Manguel, The Library at Night examines the history, culture and religious circumstances surrounding the establishment of libraries, both public and private. Throughout what seems like a rather short book...
Robert Bringhurst, The Solid Form of Language: Hebrew script, to many, is a badge of Jewishness, Arabic script a badge of the Islamic faith, Devangari script a badge of Hindu pride, Cyrillic script a badge of Slavic solidarity or Soviet...
In Six Memos for the Next Millennium Italo Calvino outlines all of the attributes and properties of great writing that he believed ought to thrive into the distant future of literature. One extract which I particularly adore is from the...
Trying to keep the number of book recommendations to a minimum is difficult when I keep stumbling over novels by Ellen Ullman (here’s my micro-review of her first book, Close to the Machine). This time though it’s The Bug, a story about...
In moving to the next generation of consoles I’ve found that it’s somehow managed to fill me with a deep and bitter sadness. This is mostly thanks to the ‘Library’ menu which is hidden amongst the rest of the interface of the Playstation...
I can’t stop thinking about this story from the latest issue of Codex magazine where an upcoming designer visits Herb Lubalin’s studio and began to wonder at all the facets and inner-workings of this celebrated graphic design agency in...
This time last year I was a pup. I had never used Sass before, I didn’t know what a shell was, and the DOM was a ghostly, nightmarish thing that infiltrated my dreams. Time has zipped by since I joined Erskine a year ago today and I’m...
There is only one law of web design: don’t mess with the scroll. Although there are infinite ways to mess with it, it’s possibly the most underestimated side effect of poor web performance. This might happen when an interface dips...
She spent her days ordering circles, squares and rectangles of color on a page. In her dreams however, in that alternate universe where she might become anything else at a moment’s notice, she believed that similar operations could be...
Whenever I watch a movie or a tv show set in the past I like to wonder how the same event might take place but under more technically advanced circumstances. Take for example a show set in the 1920s in which a character passes away and,...
Much like a blog post, an article, or a book, you don’t need to show your entire life’s work to validate your ideas. It’s not really necessary to talk about that complex relationship that you have with your father and the name of your oh...
This week I came across an interesting design problem: how do you make an SVG that’s being used as a background-image respond to the width of its container, yet also scale its height depending on the child elements within? For example...
This week the Erskine crew headed down to Brighton for dConstruct, an all day event that navigated the tumultuous and the sometimes frightening theme of communicating with computers. From cyborgs and toasters with personalities to...