A British writer and designer from San Francisco.| robinrendle.com
A British writer and designer from San Francisco.| robinrendle.com
Long time, huh?| robinrendle.com
These pages that hijack the scroll might look like slides from shiny keynote presentations but as websites they are the usability equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.| robinrendle.com
A British writer and designer from San Francisco.| robinrendle.com
An elegant solution.| robinrendle.com
Here’s Johanna Hedva:| Robin Rendle
And bleurgh to all things.| robinrendle.com
This is the research. This is the work.| robinrendle.com
A British writer and designer from San Francisco.| robinrendle.com
Maybe cool is a liability.| robinrendle.com
I love work. It drives me. It’s exciting. Everything about building things with folks is a pure thrill. Like when I crack open a hard design problem and learn something! Or when a test passes on a big refactor! Or when I watch a designer reveal something new about human cognition, about typography, about language, about a silly little bug in SVG!| Robin Rendle
And why HTML is a programming language.| robinrendle.com
Build a garden, not a feed.| robinrendle.com
Less dance, more design.| robinrendle.com
A British writer and designer from San Francisco.| robinrendle.com
A musical guide.| robinrendle.com
Goodbye, magic numbers.| robinrendle.com
I’m not a programmer. Plug me into a terminal and likely the only thing that you could wrench out of me is hello world. I can hack things together in the browser and I can certainly mask my contempt for Typescript for a day or two but there’s a hard limit for sure.| Robin Rendle
Alex Russell:| Robin Rendle
I wouldn’t have become a designer if it wasn’t for CSS3 and HTML5. They came together at just the right time and captured everything that was so exciting about publishing and typography on the web. And I was drawn towards the web because of this groundswell of excitement.| Robin Rendle
This is the longest streak of not-writing in years. It’s impossible to know what to say, impossible to describe the disappointment and frustration over the last few weeks. Right now it feels best to be quiet so I’ve thrown myself into my work: designing things, refactoring icons, trying to move the needle on some projects. For the past few weeks I’ve been tearing apart our design system docs and, on the side, imagining this interface that I haven’t seen before—it all feels genuinely...| Robin Rendle
Erin Kissane has started a new research studio with the most punk URL I’ve ever seen: wrecka.ge. Get out of here! That’s fantastic. But also everything about this project is, as Erin writes:| Robin Rendle
Great piece by Gareth Edwards about the soon-to-be defunct .io domain and a wild story about colonialism, borders, and the internet:| Robin Rendle
I’m in New York this week for a work thing, stationed close to the Empire State building. The last time I was here it was almost a decade ago and...I didn’t have a great time. Actually, I haven't liked New York the three times I’ve been here.| Robin Rendle
Mandy Brown wrote this fantastic piece about building a space on the web for yourself:| Robin Rendle
Every problem at every company I’ve ever worked at eventually boils down to “please dear god can we just hire people who know how to write HTML and CSS.”| Robin Rendle
Matt Webb just added a new feature to his website called cursor party:| Robin Rendle
In the year of our lord 2024 it feels so very antiquated that there’s separate licenses for web and desktop fonts. Every project I work on requires both font formats and I know there’s business reasons why a type foundry might make those separate purchases but as a designer it’s a deeply frustrating experience to just...use the fonts and make cool things with them.| Robin Rendle
Sarah Jeong:| Robin Rendle
Nolen Royalty writes about his wondrous One Million Checkboxes project, and how something very peculiar happened:| Robin Rendle
Here’s a lovely monospaced font by Helena Zhang that’s worth checking out. It has just the right amount of charm and charisma, but it’s still readable at small sizes. I’m downloading this thing immediately.| Robin Rendle
Last night I finished Moonbound, Robin Sloan’s latest novel, and now I am deeply, thoroughly annoyed that there aren’t seven of them lined up already for me to blitz through. I demand EarthBound, SeaBound, SpaceBound! This is the kind of novel series where you want to step inside and never let go, spending whole weeks and months in the Bound-verse, turning over every rock, reading every new book back to back without pause.| Robin Rendle
There’s this scene in Halt and Catch Fire that I think about all the time. Lee Pace (played by me) walks into an empty office with his business pal and smiles at all the emptiness. “Look,” Lee says, pointing across the room towards a chalkboard that has nothing written on it.| Robin Rendle
Here’s a fantastic post by Chevy Ray about how they made a dozens of pixel fonts using Rust:| Robin Rendle
Man, it feels good to see Geoff back at the helm over at CSS-Tricks:| Robin Rendle
I really enjoyed this post by Miriam where she pokes back against the whole “design ain’t a democracy thing” and argues that teams don’t need a boss, they need a process instead:| Robin Rendle
Great episode of the Shop Talk Show here with Chris and Dave where they chatted about that whole vibe driven development thing and I worried listening back to the episode that my original post was...misleading. And arrogant. Okay, and pretty dismissive, too.| Robin Rendle
The other day I was wondering what it would feel like to live my life with the comfort and safety of universal basic income: it would open up so many doors! Opportunities! Space to breathe and think! I likely wouldn’t quit my job, but I would take way more time off for my health, and I might go back to school or find a writing residency.| Robin Rendle
Jenny Wen:| Robin Rendle
Pavel Samsonov wrote this great thing about how Nike got bit by chasing the data instead of making a better product:| Robin Rendle
DJR has published a fantastic reintroduction to Roslindale that digs into the history behind the type family and why this style is still relevant today:| Robin Rendle
Democracies are the worst way to build a product.| Robin Rendle
I’ve been using Obsidian to write a story, partly for fun, partly as a de-stresser, but also to try my hand at a different form of writing. And one feature that I adore is the graph view which shows the relationships between your documents.| Robin Rendle
As I was walking around The Computer History Museum in Mountain View yesterday I couldn’t shake this one quote that I’d read earlier that morning: “The computer is a feeling,” says Tim Hwang and Omar Rizwan in their blog post manifesto, “not a device.”| Robin Rendle
The ugliest part about tech is the lingo, the language, the words that we use to describe our work and each other. It’s all super gross to me!| Robin Rendle
Here’s a fantastic essay by Sloan all about the tour for his latest novel Moonbound (I’m reading it right now and I love it to bits). Robin writes:| Robin Rendle
I really like Christoph’s new website. It has everything: great visual hierarchy, great subdivision of space on big screens (something I struggle with!), and also great choice of GT Alpina for headings (I spotted that wonky, almost-falling-over lowercase a in less than a heartbeat).| Robin Rendle
...as a scientist and an explorer I have a duty to bear witness to the Splendours of the World. [...] The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.| Robin Rendle
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the web is changing. Here’s Nilay Patel:| Robin Rendle
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 organization if they’re stuck in an endless cycle of quitting and starting over again?| Robin Rendle
Anil Dash:| Robin Rendle
Jack Cheng:| Robin Rendle
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! Oh, the leaves from down the street! Oh, the humanity — how hard it is to be a landlord!| Robin Rendle
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.| Robin Rendle
“Are you okay, dad?”| Robin Rendle
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 honest-to-goodness blog. I gave myself 2 days for the design, 2 days for development, and 2 days to write some example posts and see how it all looks like fitted out with real content.| Robin Rendle
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 about my job has been so obviously good and un-put-downable and almost infinitely quotable.| Robin Rendle
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 for learning how they feel about something in the process of angrily clacking on keys.| Robin Rendle
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 kicker:| Robin Rendle
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 slider sounds neat as hell:| Robin Rendle
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 the most unproductive conversations I’ve had with folks is simply down to the fact that I didn’t sit them in front of a whiteboard, put a pen in their hand, and tell them to draw their argument back to me.| Robin Rendle
Elizabeth Goodspeed:| Robin Rendle
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 being.| Robin Rendle
Smart idea via Jim Nielsen here:| Robin Rendle
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 in the prior three years. So what gives?| Robin Rendle
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 faster. But the whole product is designed around the keyboard.| Robin Rendle
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 long, you’ll see the world in squares and stories. If you use a feed all day long, you’ll see the world broken down into arguments. This scares me a bit if I’m honest!| Robin Rendle
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 page novella that I finished last night and it’s all about a murderous robot on a distant planet way in the future. It’s funny and weird and I refuse to describe anything more about it.| Robin Rendle
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 every design team on the planet could apply them and nothing much would change.| Robin Rendle
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 straightforward: there’s baby steps and then one day you notice enormous baby thuds of progress.| Robin Rendle
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.| Robin Rendle
Justin recommended A New Program for Graphic Design and it’s so good that I blitzed my way through it over a weekend.| Robin Rendle
Mandy Brown:| Robin Rendle
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.| Robin Rendle
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 conviction, with one eye always over your shoulder. After a while these self-doubting platitudes become road bumps that get in the way of describing the thing that you love.| Robin Rendle
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 flail about and make a bunch of notes and never see it through.| Robin Rendle
We got hitched!| Robin Rendle
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 reading Scott McCloud’s books about a decade ago but now I wanted to learn about the grammar of comics in more detail: where to put things, how to sequence a story, and how to shape graphics in a new and unfamiliar way.| Robin Rendle
Have you ever heard of Jusant? If not then skip all this — don’t read another word and go pick up the game. I think it might be my favorite of the year.| Robin Rendle
I kept bugging him, over and over again. How does cd work? How do I search my previous commands? How do I exit out of Vim? Wait, what even is Vim? And then how do I string multiple commands together? What fonts should I use for my terminal? Why are we using Sass and how do I use that weird app to bundle files together? Wait, now it’s stopped working and everything is shouting at me. How do I-| Robin Rendle
Here’s Michelle Barker on why we should stop using AI-generated images:| Robin Rendle
I’ve been a big fan of Manuel Moreale’sPeople and Blogs for a while now. In this lovely series of interviews, Manu asks web folks he admires how they got started writing on the ol’ www and it always makes for a fun read.| Robin Rendle
I’ve only just stumbled upon Nuform Type from Erik Marinovich but I’m so glad that I did. His type foundry has some remarkable work and beautiful fonts but the websites! Man, the websites. I wish my eye for shape and color was half as good as this stuff.| Robin Rendle
It’s been a while, huh? It’s foolish of me to run away from this website since it always makes me feel better but once every other year I do. It all seems useless. Blogging, I mean. The pursuit of self improvement and reflection without financial reward? Are you kidding me? In this economy?| Robin Rendle
Here’s one way to improve the thing you’re writing: cut the intro.| Robin Rendle
Earlier today I wrote a thing for the ol’ newsletter about which color space you should use in CSS and I mostly focused on background gradients just to explain the core concepts to myself. However! I totally missed this post about why oklch() is a great go-to choice, written by Andrey Sitnik last year:| Robin Rendle
I’m starting a new project called The Cascade, a weekly newsletter that’s entirely dedicated to the front-of-the-front-end and CSS specifically, with the very first edition coming hot off the press tomorrow morning. My goal here, for now, is to create a place where I can learn about front-end development and share everything that’s cool and new on the world wide web.| Robin Rendle
I’ve always loved a good footer at the end of a website. It sets the tone for how you leave, gives you links to more interesting things, and is the last chance for a bit of whimsy and fun and charm.| Robin Rendle
Sometimes I get bored of typography. Lately I’ve just seen the same stuff over and over again; the same kind of websites, the same kind of aesthetic, the same letters. They’re on billboards and websites and printed in books, and this rut has gotten so bad that I fear I’ve seen everything that typography is capable of. In moments like these, my gloomiest of graphic design troughs, I start to fear that typography is no longer mysterious and scary or as wondrous as it once was.| Robin Rendle
Erin Kissane just published a fantastic and terrifying piece about Meta’s complicity in the genocide of Rohingya people in Myanmar:| Robin Rendle
I’ve been showing my work to design teams at companies lately and these conversations can be brutal. Not the acting or the showmanship or the awkward silences. Not even my terrible, unforgivably bad jokes.| Robin Rendle
Nicholas Rougeux made this wonderful archive of Metra train tickets from Chicago, and it reaches back more than 50 years. Nicholas just updated the gallery, making it easier to navigate and what not and so I’m embarrassed I’ve never seen this lovely thing before!| Robin Rendle
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 crime.| Robin Rendle
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.| Robin Rendle
Chris makes a really good point in his reply to my post, especially where he says that websites are fine out of the box:| Robin Rendle
Jonas Downey wrote about how he dealt with his job blowing up:| Robin Rendle
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 objects and things and moments that you can translate back into words. He makes the example of “And When Did You Last See Your Father?” painted in 1878 by William Frederick Yeames.| Robin Rendle
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 you have to tackle these projects differently though, you have to take yourself out of the picture as much as possible:| Robin Rendle
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 take forever to figure out.| Robin Rendle