Robin Rendle
Writer, designer, and satanic .woff enthusiast.
Notes from the field
Books
- Everything I Know About Life I Learned from Powerpoint
- Packing My Library
- Timefulness
- Everything that books ought to be
- The Loves of Achilles
- A Year Without Books
- The Iliad and the Odyssey
- Cover stars
- The Strange Cultural Force of the Book Deal
- War is a force that gives us meaning
- Utopia for Realists
- So You Want to Talk About Race
- Out of Reach
- The Lonely City
- Norse Mythology
- On Writing
- H Is for Hawk
- The Hiding Place
- Stab a Book, the Book Won’t Die
- Roadside Picnic
- Invisible Cities
- Women and Power
- The Victorian Internet
- Cool Gray City of Type
- Summerland
- And Introducing: The Kickstarter
- Spelunky
- Networks of New York
- The Ends of the World
- On Beauty
- Jagannath
- The Three Body Problem
- Dictionary Stories
- Tigerman
- Spineless
- We Long to Move the Stars to Pity
- Artful
- The Elements of Eloquence
- How to be both
- Sourdough
- The Fire Next Time
- You
- The Glut is Good
- The Ground Beneath Her Feet
- What we see when we read
- Practical typography
- Bird by Bird
- The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
- Madness, Rack, and Honey
- Inside Paragraphs
- The Solid Form of Language
- Quickness and Detours
- The Bug
- Counterpunch
- Modern Typography
Typography
- Optical Size And Variable Fonts
- Two Years of Mass-Driver
- Type Specimen As Essay
- I Love Typography
- Experimental Variable Fonts
- Epicene design information
- Moiré no more
- Text on a Curve
- Marvel Superhero Lettering
- Mercure
- Puffin and Puffin Arcade
- Fonts in Focus: Louche
- Exquisite kestrels disappear
- Etna
- Writing about Typography
- Aglet Mono
- LfA Aluminia
- Colorful Headings
- Nichrome
- Subtle Optical Phenomenons
- Text for Proofing Fonts
- Lubalin’s Logotypes
- Another use case for variable fonts
- Seraph
- GT Type catalogue
- Behold the Glorious FAQ
- Blackletter type
- 8 × 8
- Foundry websites
- Systems, Mistakes, and the Sea
- First you notice the letter
- Treasures in progress
- The projects we risk everything for
- The Smallest Difference
- All things brighter
- This must be the place
- Rekindling the Ampersand
- Damn everything but the circus
- 𝘾Ǭ𝐅𝗙ē⒠, 𝘾Ǭ𝐅𝗙ē⒠, 𝘾Ǭ𝐅𝗙ē⒠
- Cardigan Sci-fi
- Vulf Sans
- A New Home
- Smaller Things
- The Berlin Handshake
- Typographic scales
- Pedantry
- Notes from the Field
- The Smallest Possible Bit
- Discipline
- The Four Kinds of Space
- The Victorian Internet
- Cool Gray City of Type
- IBM Plex
- What do you want to be when you grow up, kid?
- Working in Public
- The San Francisco Map Fair
- Ghost Town
- Flexible Typesetting
- Machines for Building Machines
- Morris Fuller Benton
- Type Journal
- California as an Island
- Jack and the Magic Key
- Videogames and WiggleTech™️
- The Mark of Sincerity
- Reforma
- Gold Rush
- The Secretary of Foreign Tongues
- Email is the Magic Key
- Potential Typography and the Oulipo
- The National Geographic
- Let’s talk about fonts
- Honor the Lexicographers
- Hangul Fonts
- A Deadly Lowercase y
- Typography is a Form of Kindness
- Serif Francisco
- Nostalgia
- Fonts as Software
- Hyperobjects and the Black Triangle
- Typographic perambulations
- Wild and Kinder Things
- Ronnia
- Ampersand
- A short note on Conductor
- Take care of the margins
- Small improvements in the right direction
- Blogs, revivals, and workshops
- Gimlet
- Practical typography
- Inside Paragraphs
- Counterpunch
- Modern Typography
Design
- Ego and Design
- Don’t think like a database
- Building Dark Mode
- Escape Bias
- Why does this design crit hurt?
- Don’t draw the UI, draw the priority
- Tokyo Train Station Stamps
- Design is not about solving problems
- Wanted everyone to feel welcome
- Notes about product design
- Unlearning the UI
- I need a hobby, do not read this one
- CWRU2K
- Teaching CSS
- End of year optimism
- The Smallest Difference
- The Dashboard Problem
- Products and platforms
- Partners in Crime
- Getting to the bottom of line height in Figma
- 1% Better
- Type Choice, Political Choice
- A City of Letters
- Reading Design
- How to Read the Internet
- Inconsistencies and productivity
- Ubiquity and consistency
- A Responsive Spreadsheet
- Setting a Typographic Scale with Sass Maps
- Feedback
- The CSS-Tricks Newsletter
- I, Website
- Now Available for Freelance Work
- In Defense of Webfonts
- A New Responsive Font Format for the Web
- Ed Snowden Taught Me To Smuggle Secrets Past Incredible Danger. Now I Teach You.
- Loading fonts with the Web Font Loader
- Ampersand 2015
- Viewsources podcast
- Making charts with CSS
- Chaining blend-modes
- Week notes #12
- Week notes #11
- Week notes #10
- Week notes #9
- Week notes #8
- Week notes #7
- Week notes #6
- Week notes #5
- Week Notes #4
- Week notes #3
- Week notes #2
- Week notes #1
- Scrambled eggs and serifs
- Resources for learning how to JavaScript
- Future of Web Design 2014
- Dust jackets and snark
- Setting type with Sass maps
- Our favourite typefaces of 2013
- Empty Libraries
- The first floor
- Scrolljacking
- Intrinsic Ratios and SVGs
- Front-end Maintenance and the Ladder of Abstraction
- Quarks, Atoms and Molecules
- Mistaking the tool for the practice
- Bookmarking
- Setting up a default type stylesheet
Writing
- Everything I Know About Life I Learned from Powerpoint
- Thanks Doc
- Draft no.4
- Webster’s 1913
- You’re probably using the wrong dictionary
- My anti-resume
- A New Thing
- Care for the Text
- The Writers We Thought We Were
- Punctuation in novels
- Pointing at things
- Foundation
- Running a Successful Membership Program
- Indeterminacy
- Less homework! More fun!
- No one is above grief
- The Punk Rock Essay Machine
- Writing and lightness
- The Inertia of Bad Ideas
- Who the fuck is Guy Debord?
- Craig Mod on Membership
- Start with the drama
- To hell, to hell...
- Some Unsolicited Newsletter Advice
- Good is better than perfect
- Good Writing and Analytics Don’t Mix
- What writers really do when they write
- Notes on Adventures
- An interview with Italo Calvino
Drama!
- The Sound I Left Behind
- Like Clockwork
- Escape
- An Ode to BART
- How Not To Be A Jerk
- Crease
- Omens
- Old Place, New Place, Reef
- From way out here
- One of those photographs
- The Catalogue of Broken Hearts
- Cool +1
- Everything is a Story
- Homesick
- Between the Third and Fifth Apology
- Hyperbolic Time Chamber v.3
- Hyperbolic Time Chamber v.2
- Visa acquired!
- Hyperbolic Time Chamber v.1
- The one about the thing
- Dartmoor, Death Stranding, and me
- The Measure of Success
- O
- Take your broken heart and blog
- Food and Sleep: II
- Confidence and Berry Glen
- Isolationism
- A Thousand Ships
- The Slip
- Christmas in LA
- Potential and Loss
- What do you want to do when you grow up, kid?
- A Rant after a Day
- From San Francisco to Los Angeles
- Jack and the Magic Key
- Bourdain
- 11am
- To Oregon!
- The Triumph Street Triple
- Demisemihemidemisemiquaver
- The Ledger
- Songs of San Francisco
- Books as Work
- The Sutro Tower
- Berlin, indefinitely
- In Praise of Green Light
- One Thousand Days in America
- Learning in public
- Cushion
- Food and Sleep
- With teeth of metal and glass
- The Great Unbundling
- You’re not welcome here
- Chloe
- Deep breaths in St Paul’s cathedral
- The daydreams of a book designer
- Purdy
- The Comforts of the Siren
- The Float
- The Dream Sponge
Design Systems
- An incoherent rant about design systems
- The difference between correct-ness and useful-ness in a design system
- Design Systems Metrics
- What Does a Good Design System Feel Like?
- On the design systems between us
- Maps and Spreadsheets
- The Smallest Difference
- Start a newsletter
- Resistant to data
- The Success of Many Days
- Design, system.
- The Harmony of the System
- Building a UI Kit in Figma
- The Design System You Already Have
- Consensus in design systems
- Design Systems at Gusto: Part II
- Design Systems at Gusto
- Advice for a young systems designer
CSS
Videogames
Newsletter
Behold! My newsletter—sent infrequently—about new things that I’m working on. Every so often it contains notes about web design and publishing things that I’m interested in, too. It’s eclectic, a little odd, and won’t always be about web design or fonts. You have been warned.