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
Smart idea via Jim Nielsen here: body:has(dialog[open]) { overflow: hidden;} I still haven’t used :has outside of little demos and screwing around in Codepen but there’s been a growing chorus over the last few months about all the tiny...
We made a list on my team at Retool the other day of all the things we’ve done, everything we’ve shipped since the team started back in November. And it’s a lot! Plus, I realized that we’d shipped more in the last four months than I had...
I don’t know if this is a trend or anything but I like the idea of this: keyboard-first apps. Chris shared Godspeed, a todo list app, that has a “hardcore mode” that disables the mouse so you can get used to the keyboard shortcuts even...
That’s the question that PJ Vogt asks Ezra Klein over on Search Engine. It’s a real interesting conversation and there’s a bit where they talk about how the medium you use the most influences the way you think. If you use IG all day...
The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells is fantastic. I admit that I’m real late to the party here but I can't remember the last time I read anything as effortlessly page-turning as this. The first book, All Systems Red, is a breezy 150...
I’ve sat through a lot of discussions about design principles and they always read like weak sauce to me. They focus on pixels or craft or some other wishy washy hand wavy faffery that I can’t apply to my work. Or they’re so generic that...
It’s been about four months since I joined the product design team at Retool and I’ve noticed something in my work click forward. Just a slight nudge, nothing that anyone else would spot. That’s mostly because progress is never...
A few months ago I found a ton of old HyperCard assets, along with the illustrations (some from Susan Kare) of the original Mac team, too. I wondered how to repurpose them, how to give them new life. So this mighty fine morning I...
Justin recommended A New Program for Graphic Design and it’s so good that I blitzed my way through it over a weekend. The book began as a course on graphic design by David Reinfurt at Princeton, which was then condensed into a three day...
Mandy Brown: This is one of my answers to the question of, why give a fuck about work? Why love your work? It won’t, of course, love you back. It can’t. Work isn’t a thing that can love. It isn’t alive, it isn’t and won’t ever be living....
I could have spent three minutes on a sketch or three months designing a new interface from scratch but it’s all the same to me: if it doesn’t ship, then it doesn’t count. I’m not sure why I feel this way, perhaps because I started my...
A writing tip for myself in the future, if I may (and I do): delete every use of “…for me…,” “in my opinion,” “some might disagree,” “I think,” etc. etc. These snippets are a bad habit and make your writing fragile, lacking any...
Ambition always gets the best of me. Instead of trying to write a book I’ll have to write the single greatest work of fiction the world has ever seen. The problem there is that, you might have noticed, that never happens and instead I...
We got hitched! It was a Friday afternoon—bright and cold, with a cloudless blue sky—when our small group headed to San Francisco City Hall for the ceremony; my brother had flown in from the UK for the first time and we’d spent the week...
I just started work on my next essay and it’s clear to me at this point that it’s visually going to be inspired by comics. So I asked Lucy for advice about where to get started learning about layouts, formatting, etc. because I remember...