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
Mentioning e-readers in 2023 feels like a forbidden subject and recommending an e-reader is almost sinful. It’s like committing a crime by breaking a pact of silence and then following that up by being incredibly boring whilst you do the...
Today I launched an update to my website! I’m not entirely sure which version I’m on at this point but I’ve been calling it v13 whilst I’ve been working on it and so that’s what we’ll stick with for now. The goal here was to merge the...
Chris makes a really good point in his reply to my post, especially where he says that websites are fine out of the box: What’s extra fricked about all this is that you really gotta try to screw up a website as much as we do. Pick a...
Jonas Downey wrote about how he dealt with his job blowing up: One major cause of suffering was that I had associated my identity and personal sense of self-worth with my company and its culture. Although I was not an owner of the...
A few years ago I walked into a bookstore and noticed something peculiar: I found that every book was okay. In fact, books had gotten pretty damn good! A random book in a random bookstore is likely to have an interesting cover with good...
Daemon Voices is a collection of essays about storytelling by Philip Pullman and there’s this one bit I can’t stop thinking about. It’s where Philip argues that there’s two types of paintings. First, there’s the kind that are about...
Here’s Leah Spencer writing for Alphabettes about her fabulous work as a graphic designer for film and TV. Her job is to create all the typographic objects that you might see in a show like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel but Leah says that...
I’ve been iterating on my portfolio for the last few days whilst desperately applying for a bunch of gigs and last night I finally got it into a good place. I’m not sure why it took so dang long but some problems are just stubborn and...
Guillaume Berry just launched a new site for the type foundry Marmite Defontes and by golly if it just sure ain’t the prettiest/fastest website I’ve seen today. This project is a great reminder that speed is more important than almost...
Last month I redesigned my website, so it’s about time to do it again. This one includes a bunch of interesting details to talk through but perhaps it’s better to call this a “reshuffle” more than a “redesign.” i. # I’ve replaced...
I’ve been really enjoying brr, a blog from a chap who works in IT at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. They write about basically everything, from hunkering down for winter... South Pole Station sits at near-exactly 90°...
Whoa, @maya. I’ve never heard of a black Book of Hours like this one before. What an absurdly beautiful thing: The lettering is inscribed in silver and gold and placed within borders ornamented with flowers, foliage and grotesques, on...
This piece by Dr Eleanor Janega on successor states and websites is so damn good it hurts. She compares the “fall” of Rome to what’s happening to the social network that’s now nothing more than a bunch of thugs in a trench coat: We are...
For years I’ve tried to make the ending of whatever piece I’m writing have a little thump right at the end, a bit of drama to make the machine stop. I can’t remember where or who I stole this technique from but at some point I noticed...
I love everything about Guide Guide by Cameron McEfee—it’s a plugin for design tools that allows you to create complex grid systems real easy. On the website, Cameron writes: We’ve gone soft. Our modern design tools, great as they are,...