Robin RendleNotes from the field.2024-03-19T02:38:47Zhttps://robinrendle.com/Robin Rendlerobinjrendle@gmail.com.comBe kind, be cool2024-03-10T16:48:14Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/be-kind-be-cool/<p>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.</p>
<p>In startup land, these bullet point lists aren’t really meant to hold anyone’s toes to the fire or make anything truly better. Design principles are often used to brag about how great the design team is instead. And, well, meh. That’s not what they’re supposed to be for. These principles often reveal deep insecurities about what folks see as the weaknesses in their design org which is just very performative and silly to me.</p>
<p>So: I don’t think org-specific design principles are all that useful.</p>
<p>But as a designer you should always think about what guides your eye and what guides your cursor! So what guides mine? Well, there’s two principles that I think about every day:</p>
<ol>
<li>Is this kind?</li>
<li>Is this cool?</li>
</ol>
<p>Kindness is easy to quantify. Kindness will make you do things that’s bad for business but great for customers that will eventually make it great for your business again. At this one company many years ago I remember arguing that we should add unsubscribe links to our emails and someone said “nah, that’s bad for us and this number will go down.” Well, that ain’t kind! That’s super shitty and eventually decisions like that will make you lose trust with folks. People are highly sensitive to scummy behavior from ten thousand miles away and it’s the best way to differentiate yourself with someone else.</p>
<p>As soon as you see the world from that vantage point of kindness then I think you’ll do all sorts of work that other teams wouldn’t dream of. Performance is kind. Accessibility is kind. etc. etc.</p>
<p>That second principle though, coolness, is much harder to quantify and harder to reason about. It’s about style, sure. It’s about pushing back against visual trends and product trends and common patterns. But I think it’s about how a team is structured and avoiding the easy way out of problems. Are a million meetings every week cool? Nope. Are deadlines cool? Nah.</p>
<p>What is cool when it comes to building a thing then? My hunch: tiny, tiny teams with tons of autonomy where they can ship things without the endless bureaucracy and back and forth of a large organization.</p>
<p>(Cool teams build kind things.)</p>
<p>ANYWAY, these two principles have been helpful for me when building stuff and making decisions when writing too, but I think it’s also helpful when finding a job. During that whole painful process you have to find people who agree with you about the world, who see it the same way you do to some degree. And I know that if folks don’t agree with me about kindness and coolness then it’s impossible to work happily alongside them.</p>
<p>With that said, I’m not always cool and I’m certainly not always kind.</p>
<p>But I sure do try.</p>
The Elevator Test2024-02-22T17:13:21Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/elevator-test/<p>It’s been about four months since I joined the product design team at <a href="https://retool.com/">Retool</a> 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.</p>
<p>I still make all sorts of mistakes though! I don’t notice obvious visual design problems in my work or in what ships and I’m often inconsistent in a few areas, like I’m bad at scoping down the work to the most essential elements. I’m real bad at anything related to animations. But I am seeing steady progress overall.</p>
<p>The biggest change in my work that I’ve spotted is that I’m no longer nervous when I jump on a project. I’ve done this kinda product design work for long enough at this point where I trust that <em>eventually</em> I’ll figure out a solution to this sticky problem. Even if right now I have to live in the muck and the confusion and the conflicting opinions about what to do next.</p>
<p>The second biggest change in my design work relates back to something that my boss, <a href="https://ryanlucas.org/">Ryan Lucas</a>, told me about “the elevator test.” He said that back in design school his teacher would get him to put their products in between the doors of an elevator and watch it slam shut, destroying their product completely. The lesson here being that prototypes are tools to make the final thing better, you shouldn’t be precious about them, and what really counts isn’t what you’ve made but what you’ve learned.</p>
<p>Now you can make the next one better.</p>
<p>I took this lesson to heart so that these days I make at least fifty different competing prototypes for everything I design. Left aligned right aligned upside down and inside out. Make the background use system colors and random awful gradients, use different font weights even if it’s not part of the design system. What if this step came first, last, or we removed it completely? How does that feel? Let me click it, let me see it work or fail but who cares if it does? All of these designs are supposed to suck. The more awful drafts and bad ideas we see, the more clearly the good ones will shine through.</p>
<p>When it comes to product design, the elevator test is the critique—that’s the moment where I’m slamming the doors down on my work and seeing what happens next. And if I just make enough iterations and prototypes, eventually the doors might slam shut on one of them and then—stop.</p>
Mini Manifesto2024-02-21T16:12:46Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/mini-manifesto/<p>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.</p>
<p>So this mighty fine morning I released an update to my site that’s been cooking for a bit: <a href="https://robinrendle.com/">a new homepage</a> that describes what this place is. It’s a fun mini-manifesto about how I think about personal blogs and the state of the web in 2024 and how it relates back to HyperCard. There’s a feeling I’m trying to capture here of frustration and sadness of the modern web, whilst comparing that to the joyous, absolute freedom of making software on the net.</p>
<p>The web can be both things at once!</p>
<p>(Side note: I tried real hard to find Kare’s original New York typeface which is far, far superior to Chicago but I cannot for the life of me find anything similar. Either way, this project made me realize that pixellated serifs are the coolest fonts of them all.)</p>
A *New* Program for Graphic Design2024-02-11T17:01:27Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-new-program-for-graphic-design/<p><a href="https://www.justinpervorse.com/">Justin</a> recommended <em>A <em>New</em> Program for Graphic Design</em> and it’s so good that I blitzed my way through it over a weekend.</p>
<p>The book began as a course on graphic design by David Reinfurt at Princeton, which was then condensed into a three day talk that was then recorded, edited, and condensed again into <a href="https://a-new-program-for-graphic-design.org/">a lovely book</a>. Just that whole publishing exercise is real neat alone, without the book itself being extremely very good. But good it is.</p>
<p>The book is split into three courses about graphic design: typography, gestalt, and interface, but it doesn’t ever sit you down and nail the basics into your head about design. It’s not a book to learn about font-size and line-height. Instead, the book is pretty wild and rambling, scanning over a huge number of topics that are then are dropped on a whim in favor of something else more exciting that catches David’s eye. It sorta feels like a book of printed blog posts (not an insult!) and the energy matches a feverish, excited blog too.</p>
<p>In the intro, David writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This certainly is not a carefully collected, carefully crafted collection of rules, guidelines, and methods intended to shore up design as a relevant discipline. It is inevitably more of a digressive, discursive ramble and occasionally high speed pitch across any number of subjects and settings though never possibly enough. Anyone else by definition would do this differently, it’s limited as much by my imagination and my experience as by the practical constraints of a book. But in its form is also its argument.</p>
<p>So let me be explicit: when you’ve finished A <em>New</em> Program for Graphic Design, rip it up, throw it away, and get busy assembling your own.</p>
<p>Now let’s get started.</p>
</blockquote>
A unified theory of fucks2024-01-27T06:43:06Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/a-unified-theory-of-fucks/<p><a href="https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/unified-theory-of------">Mandy Brown</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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, <a href="https://aworkinglibrary.com/reading/work-wont-love-you-back">love you back</a>. It can’t. Work isn’t a thing that can love. It isn’t alive, it isn’t and won’t ever be living. And my answer is: don’t.</p>
<p>[...] That’s what work is, after all. Work—the action of change, the movement of energy from one being to another—is the means by which fucks are granted. Good work is the art of giving a fuck about the living. And all of us, every day, are faced with good work that needs doing, and good work that we can do.</p>
</blockquote>
If it doesn’t ship, then it doesn’t count2024-01-21T20:09:08Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/if-it-doesnt-ship-then-it-doesnt-count/<p>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.</p>
<p>I’m not sure why I feel this way, perhaps because I started my career as a front-end developer and became addicted to the short turn around time of spotting a problem, making a commit, and then playing with the fix live in production. But a lot of design doesn’t work that way. You’re entirely dependent on a team of folks to build what you have in mind. There’s a lot of trust involved because if a project is dashed or someone leaves or things are reorganized then your work was, well, for nothing.</p>
<p>I’m still early in my career but I’ve noticed this worrying trend of my work being abandoned or not entirely finished or not exactly what we agreed upon in the mocks. This is bad for three reasons:</p>
<ol>
<li>I have formed my entire personality around shipping stuff, making progress, keeping the momentum going, and if my designs are just locked away in some file forever then it feels like I wasted my limited resources on a bunch of hot air. I should work on this.</li>
<li>If the team hasn’t shipped my designs then it looks bad on me as a designer! If I couldn’t gather support for my ideas then there is most likely something wrong with my approach or the mockups. Being in portfolio reviews and telling someone “yeah, this didn’t ship or that or that or that” is brutal and thoroughly embarrassing.</li>
<li>Those pixels in my mockups aren’t there to flatter me or my portfolio. They have a job to do, out there, in the world. They should be helping people, if only by a fractional degree.</li>
</ol>
<p>The only thing I can learn as a designer from these experiences is to try and improve my skills. Why didn’t that ship? Was it too much? Too big a change? Too disorganized? Or was that design unrelated to the problem that we were trying to solve? Did I stop pushing for this fix, this feature? Did I talk to the right person or team?</p>
<p>I suppose this is the concern that all product designers have and it’s unhealthy that I put so much of the blame on myself for not getting things out the door. But still, if those designs aren’t out there helping folks then...</p>
<p>...what’s the point?</p>
Be loud about the things you love2024-01-14T23:39:56Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/be-loud-about-the-things-you-love/<p>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.</p>
<p>I’m working on a big piece right now and I just skimmed through it all, removing all those gestures of self-doubt and the sentences quickly snapped together in a more satisfying way without them. But you, future Robin, might ask: shouldn’t we be worried about sounding too certain? Too <a href="https://css-tricks.com/increasing-wariness-dogmatism/">dogmatic</a>? Yes, certainly, but that requires carefully listening to the tone of what you’re writing, then editing out anything that’s a bit too grandiose.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Now some might disagree but, for me, in my opinion, I think that this isn’t good advice.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Doesn’t this sound like a lil bug, apologizing for being stepped on? Or a car with all its wheels spinning in the mud? Every week I watch a review or read a piece where someone is describing an exciting thing but that excitement is partly extinguished by the fear of their audience disagreeing with them. But I get it, it’s tough to say “I love this” and then a thousand people climbing out of the mud to say how that thing you love, actually, secretly sucks.</p>
<p>When this kind of thing happens again, here’s some advice (now read this in the most loving, fatherly voice): there’s certainly not one way to design a building or make a website or live a life, and there’s no one genre of film or music or theatre that stands above all the others. There are no perfect video games or novels or cities.</p>
<p>But there <em>is</em> only one way to love something; earnestly, without forgiveness or apology. So be loud about the things you love!</p>
Resolutions are dumb2024-01-01T20:22:51Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/resolutions-are-dumb/<p>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.</p>
<p>The same goes for working out. If I’m not jacked after two weeks of eating better and working out then I’m a colossal failure. I become demoralized, I start eating trash again, and I feel embarrassed and ashamed and never want to go to the gym again.</p>
<p>But every ounce of progress I’ve ever made is because I’ve focused on much, much smaller goals. Goals so small that they don’t even look like goals. Just write this morning. Just finish that chapter. Just get one less coffee. Just go for a walk over that hill. Just don’t eat that. Just call. Just work. Just sleep. These tiny, every day details are where progress is made. The small routines.</p>
<p>So what I’m trying in 2024: no life-changing goals. Screw the resolutions! No more trying to write the next great American novel, no more trying to become the best designer with the sharpest eye, no more unhealthy ambitions that lead nowhere.</p>
<p>Right now my goal is to hit 240lbs over the next week. That’s barely a goal! Who cares about a few pounds? My goal tomorrow is to wake up at 6.30am. How hard is that? My goal today is to go for a big walk up that hill. How easy! The difference is that all these goals are so tiny that they become manageable, simple enough to do right now. But eventually, over time and with enough work, they turn into something bigger. With enough discipline they turn into a freight train of progress. A genuine resolution.</p>
<p>But not today. Today I just gotta go walk up that hill.</p>
Hitched2023-12-30T19:07:05Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/hitched/<img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/first-meet.webp" alt="My reaction to seeing C in her dress" width="1200" height="auto" />
<p>We got hitched!</p>
<p>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 prior walking around and doing touristy things like going to Alcatraz; some friends had driven up from southern California or travelled across the bridge; C’s family came over from the Outer Sunset, with her sister translating everything during the ceremony.</p>
<p>C wore a beautiful dress that she’d retrofitted, adding a veil that trailed behind her and ten thousand other adjustments and tweaks that she would never brag about but I certainly will.</p>
<p>The night before, with our pal, we stayed up late working on the boutonnières and the bouquet. It was here that I discovered my incomprehensible, unfathomable ignorance when it comes to flower arrangement. I thought it would be just like graphic design where you move contrasting shapes and colors, arrange a space into something comprehensible. IT’S JUST A BUNCH OF PLANTS, MATE.</p>
<p>But there’s a hierarchy of flowers—rules and regulations to their placement—that’s invisible to me. So our pal saved the day with her eye for details like that.</p>
<img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/suit.webp" alt="My wedding suit; a forest green three piece" width="1200" height="auto" />
<p>I could write ten thousand words about this three piece suit from <a href="http://tailorskeep.com/">Tailor’s Keep</a> and the joy of watching the amazing folks who made it. Just like the flowers, I discovered that there’s so much to learn when it comes to wearing a suit! The way that a jacket should compliment your body, the way that a shirt should show just a bit of sleeve underneath, and how you can add details to it that no-one else can see. Just for kicks.</p>
<p>Like on the inside of this jacket, where if you peel it back you’ll find a shimmering gold pattern that looks like the ceiling of a chateau.</p>
<p>During the ceremony, as my brother passed the rings over to the officiant, someone goofed the hand-off and one of the rings tumbled to the floor. Everyone in the our group gasped and then broke into awkward laughter. “5 second rule,” I whispered to C as she hastily picked it up and gave it to me.</p>
<p>We took our vows and then bolted for the exit.</p>
<p>Next? <a href="https://theinterval.org/">The Interval</a>, the home of the Long Now Foundation, and an astonishing bar on the tip of the Marina with drinks that are far too good in a <em>forgettable-oh-no-I-have-drunk-too-much sort of way</em>. Our friends joined us, cheered for us, took pictures by the water, and a grand total of zero speeches were given (as it should be).</p>
<img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/celebration-interval.webp" alt="At the Interval, where a group of people surround us both and cheers us with drinks held high." width="1200" height="auto" />
22 panels2023-12-27T18:17:26Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/22-panels/<p>I just started work on my next <a href="https://robinrendle.com/essays">essay</a> and it’s clear to me at this point that it’s visually going to be inspired by comics. So I asked <a href="https://lucybellwood.com/">Lucy</a> 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.</p>
<p>Lucy first hyperlinked me to <a href="https://comicsdevices.com/">The Creator’s Guide to Comics Devices</a> by Reimena Yee which is exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. The strange thing is that these guides are simple and obvious when you look at them but, right now, for me, they’re revelatory. Take <a href="https://comicsdevices.com/contraction/">contraction</a>, where something like the spacing of gutters between panels in a comic can act as easily overlooked punctuation:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Contracting panels produce particular evocative affects. Often it increases tension, heightens focus, or evoke physical and experiential affects such as losing consciousness and claustrophobia...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Lucy also linked to this post about comic book artist Wally Wood and his rules and guides for speeding up the work called <em>22 panels</em>. Artists, if ever stuck, would reference these rules to unblock them, as <a href="https://cloudfour.com/thinks/22-panels-that-always-work-wally-woods-legendary-productivity-hack/">Scott Vandehey writes</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The “22 panels” we know today were assembled by one of Wood’s assistants, Larry Hama: “When I was starting out as an editor at Marvel, I found myself in the position of having to coach fledgling artists on the basics of visual storytelling, and it occurred to me that the reminder sheets Woody made would help in that regard.”</p>
<p>Hama later said, “I don’t believe that Woody put the examples together as a teaching aid for his assistants, but rather as a reminder to himself. He was always trying to kick himself to put less labor into the work! He had a framed motto on the wall, ‘Never draw anything you can copy, never copy anything you can trace, never trace anything you can cut out and paste up.’ He hung the sheets with the panels on the wall of his studio to constantly remind himself to stop what he called ‘noodling.’”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>(Most front-end dev work to me is noodling and I realize that my whole sojourn into design systems was inspired by removing all this noodling work, and trying to get us all working together on the bigger, harder problems. Rather than, ya know, making the fifteenth inconsistent toast component or whatever.)</p>
<p>Finally, Lucy linked me to these <a href="https://blambot.com/pages/lettering-tips">comic book lettering tips</a> by Nate Piekos that are pretty fun. He has a lot of screaming advice, such as:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>DON’T CROSS BALLOON TAILS...EVER</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And now I wish there were rules like this for product design that I could refer to now and again whenever I start noodling because I certainly spend far too much time moving elements around on a page when the big, useful work is sometimes left pushed aside or abandoned, incomplete. Also — as I’m mid-ramble anyway — I strongly believe that there’s many lessons us web designers ought to pilfer from these comics. The use of space and rhythm, the hierarchy of information and the gradual reveal of ideas, building on the suggestions of the last page, sequentially, until the big reveal at the end.</p>
<p>My bet is this: if you find yourself asking what the future of reading on the web looks like, then I guarantee that it’s comic books from 50 years ago that hold all the answers.</p>
Jusant2023-12-23T18:32:30Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/jusant/<p>Have you ever heard of <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/1977170/Jusant/">Jusant</a>? 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.</p>
<p>I booted up Jusant in the early afternoon and was feeling pretty cynical about everything, expecting to bounce off and return to my mindless fast food games — explosions and loot boxes and endless violence. But Jusant stopped me in my tracks in the way a great movie does. It slapped the cynicism right out of me and I realized that I couldn’t put the controller down, finishing it all in just one sitting. From the moment I hit START to the moment the credits rolled I had a big stupid grin on my face: The music! The setting! The rope physics!</p>
<p>The story!</p>
<p>In Jusant the world has ended. The water is gone. You’re a lone wanderer in an empty desert with a strange blue pet who, for reasons unknown, must climb an enormous mountain that reaches into the heavens. The gameplay requires you to scurry and jump and hook your way up empty cliffside towns reading old notes (which I actually stopped to read!) and listening to seashells that have recorded the sounds of these now abandoned cities. It’s sad and beautiful in equal measure.</p>
<p>I could go on and on. About the world building, about how Jusant treats the apocalypse, about the sounds and music, the lack of any speech or dialogue. But before I bore you to tears I want to make myself as clear as can be: Jusant is a classic, en par with the likes of Journey.</p>
<p>A straight-up 10 out of 10.</p>
I am a poem I am not software2023-12-06T15:51:40Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/i-am-a-poem-i-am-not-software/<p>A personal website sits on the blurry line between a corporate entity and a skate park. Because a personal website has everything in its future; career connections and maybe weirdo web friends out there, potential ad money to be squeezed out of it or analytics to be siphoned. These constraints and incentives push our websites to be reserved or fabulous and there’s really no right answer here since a personal website can be anything we want it to be.</p>
<p>Yesterday Katherine asked <a href="https://sunny.garden/@kayserifserif/111523195687578771">how to strike the right balance</a> though:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>website worry-stone people:</p>
<p>how can i feel free to tinker with my website without feeling like it's supposed to be my main public-facing thing and should therefore contain all the proper public-facing things and be well structured and well maintained and not in a constant state of half-brokenness?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m sort of dragging the conversation in a different direction <em>slightly</em> here but what Katherine touches on is the oldest question on the internet: what should our personal websites do? Should we prioritize getting a new gig or selling a service? Or can we be ourselves? Weird and fun and peculiar? Should we talk about topic X but avoid topic Y? That’s a common one I hear from fellow bloggers. Or what if a potential employer doesn’t see the last big project we worked on? Are we hurting our future careers by blogging about fun recipes or books that we like? Isn’t that an unnecessary distraction from moving from an L3 to an L4 or whatever?</p>
<p>But my question has always been this: how can we be both?</p>
<p>I certainly haven’t figured anything out — I struggle with these questions all the time. Like one day I’ll stumble on a website that’s gloriously corpo in the best possible way: smart typesetting, clean imagery, plain copy. The blog posts are pristine, helpful, perfunctory. It’s a business card, really. Perfect. I get it. But despite my jealousy of how clean and straightforward they are, within twenty seconds I’ve forgotten about them. That sounds like an indictment or a complaint, but it really isn’t. Those familiar layouts and common intros—“Hello, I am XXXX and I’m an XYZ”—are everywhere for a reason. They’re safe. They work. And I’ve made many of those websites!</p>
<p>But then I’ll spot one of those...other websites, the <a href="https://www.kickscondor.com/">Condor-esque</a> websites, the rare and dazzling kind that are so weird and bewildering that it might take a few minutes before you realize what the website even is and how it works. Oh…this is…a…website? Huh…and they make zines on the side? About plants? In the late Triassic era! Neat!</p>
<p>Sure the website might be a little broken and so strange that it pushes some folks away. But at least we’ll remember it later.</p>
<p>There’s a constant tug of war between wanting to be professional and wanting to be cool online. Sometimes those things overlap and sometimes they don’t. And sometimes the folks who have the opportunities to make a weirdo website are doing so because they’re not financially dependent on their website selling a service or landing a new gig. Their economic livelihood isn’t at risk if someone is turned off by the strange fonts or experimental navigation on their website.</p>
<p>I’m saying all this because I know it’s more complicated than the answer I’m about to give but:</p>
<p>I want weirder, more broken websites!</p>
<p>I want the navigation to be wild and uncouth, I want a website to push me in the same way that any great artist’s work pushes me. I hate it when I land on a website and it feels like a SQL database has simply been inserted into a generic template.</p>
<p>So <a href="https://sunny.garden/@fonts@sfba.social/111523506675480934">my reply to Katherine</a> was along those lines:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>@kayserifserif Embrace the worry stone! Let it all be broken and weird! You’re a poem and not software! Down with one sentence intros and lame designery organized minimalism!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I think it’s also a matter of trusting your audience, too. It’s okay to be weird, folks will get it! Or they won’t! And perhaps that’s for the best. But trying to be everyone else has been done already.</p>
<p>Either way, the more boring personal websites I see the more I want to skip the boring corporate handshake at the beginning. Because you’re more than a list of accomplishments, more than a career, more than a Wordpress template, or SQL query, more than one subject for a narrow audience.</p>
<p>And a personal website should capture that thing we’re all trying to avoid, as cheesy as it sounds: that we are a poem and not software.</p>
Figure it out2023-12-01T17:23:56Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/figure-it-out/<p>I kept bugging him, over and over again. How does <code>cd</code> 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-</p>
<p>“Robin! Buddy! You just have to figure it out.”</p>
<p>I’d been an intern at this web design agency for a month or so and by this point I’d already asked this chap about ten thousand questions. The whole room went quiet though and I remember being so horribly embarrassed.</p>
<p>My first thought was: Wow! What a colossal jerk! But after I got home and calmed down a bit I realized that I had become dependent on this chap to get anything done. So much so that I couldn’t figure anything out for myself and had forgotten how to learn things independently.</p>
<p>But, in my defense, making websites in 2013 felt ridiculously complicated. There were all these build steps and templating languages and wizard-like commands that seemed to require inherited knowledge. There was the all new hotness of HTML5 and CSS3! Sass and Less were taking the world by storm! New React-ish ways of building websites! It felt insurmountable, paralyzing even.</p>
<p>I assumed that making websites professionally for money would be rad and cool but these kinds of websites were so very different from the simplicity of what I was familiar with. It all felt ugly! The building of websites like this, I mean. Everywhere you looked there was this horrid complexity that just built up and up until even a medium-sized website was a towering behemoth of complexity.</p>
<p>There are some subjects you can’t figure out for yourself. Medicine, for example. But this whole web design business is something you can learn independently and over time those towering behemoths of complexity will turn into regular ol’ Wordpress websites in your mind. There are tutorials and websites to help and so, when I went back home for the holidays that year, I locked myself in my room.</p>
<p>I was going to learn the command line.</p>
<p>And then...I did.</p>
<p>After a few late nights of exhilarating tutorials and thrilling demos I had figured out how to navigate through the back door of my computer. Being stuck and then pushing myself through something wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be. Teach an anxious boy to fish, etc. etc.</p>
<p>So all this taught me a valuable lesson. Half of this gig is being scared and unsure and then finding the answer for yourself. And my lack of confidence in being wrong until I’m suddenly right (still, to this day) holds me back from being a great designer and engineer.</p>
<p>I should still ask for help when I truly need it, sure, and I should always try to help others who are coming up behind me.</p>
<p>But, sometimes, you just gotta figure it out.</p>
Stop Using AI-Generated Images2023-11-28T15:47:43Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/stop-using-ai-generated-images/<p>Here’s Michelle Barker on why we should <a href="https://css-irl.info/stop-using-ai-generated-images/">stop using AI-generated images</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>By choosing AI-generated images over those made by a human, editors are taking away one of the only sources of income available to those entering the field. This means that fewer people will choose to train in the profession. It will disproportionately affect those from low-income backgrounds, unable to justify the high cost of an art education with little prospect of earning a living. Illustration will become the preserve of the already well-off.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I always thought those AI-generated images in blog posts and elsewhere around the web were tacky and lame, but I hadn’t seriously considered the future economic impact on illustrators.</p>
People and Blogs2023-11-24T19:32:45Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/people-and-blogs/<p>I’ve been a big fan of <a href="https://manuelmoreale.com/about">Manuel Moreale’s</a> <a href="https://peopleandblogs.com/">People and Blogs</a> 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.</p>
<p>Today though I had the privilege of <a href="https://manuelmoreale.com/pb-robin-rendle">Manu interviewing me</a>. It helped me clarify a few decisions I’ve made over the years about the tech under the hood, my process, and ultimately why I still blog in the year 2023:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You don’t need to ask permission from some big publisher in London or New York to have a cool blog, and I suddenly realized that’s the real magic of it all: the world wide web gives you permission. That’s what makes it more punk rock than print.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In my day job as a designer I have to constantly ask for things to change. Can I improve this? Can I try that? What about this over here? And that makes sense considering it’s a business and any decision I make could have profound financial implications for hundreds or even thousands of people.</p>
<p>But it can still feel slow, slow, slow to me.</p>
<p>With a blog you can move as fast or as slow as you like though since you control everything. There’s no asking to change this or that and there’s no one that can get in your way or slow you down. You don’t have to beg someone on the other side of the world to like what you do, to deem it worthy. Just the fact that you’re doing it makes it important! And so that degree of control and permission with a blog or personal website is still thrilling to me.</p>
<p>On the tech side of things, I’ve always felt that the goal of my website is to shorten the distance between my keyboard and the URL as much as possible. Over the years I’ve tuned that build process until I’m almost typing directly onto my website:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...heed this lesson: your blogging tech stack should not be smart. That’s the most painful thing I’ve learned over the years. We need to take out all the complex build tools and fragile parts that slow us down and prevent us from doing the writing. It doesn’t matter if you’re using the coolest new tech thing, what matters is this: how fast can you write and publish something?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m giving that feedback to myself here since not so long ago I made the mistake of changing my blog to the latest coolest framework and it made the build process better but the actual blogging much more painful. It was slow! It got in the way! And I felt that distance between keyboard and URL increase with each new update to the framework. The more features they added, the more often I had to read the docs, the more instability I saw. But blogging over the long term demands stability! So I threw it all out and went back to Eleventy. (Sorry, Zach).</p>
<p>During this interview Manu also gave me the space to think about blogging and, ugh, money:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Income is a strange way to measure the success of a blog though. For example, I make $0 a year. There’s no ads or merch on my website. But then again my website has given me opportunities that even a huge paycheck never could. My blog has connected me with friends, future employers, and nifty freelance gigs. My blog has led to money in my pocket, eventually, through some weird roundabout way. But I fear that if I focused on the money then all those other things would disappear.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I still struggle with the money side of things a bit. But those sorts of opportunities to thread and weave my life into a greater tapestry of cool designers and writers can’t be measured in USD.</p>
<p>Anyway, I hope this chat was as useful for other folks as it was helpful for me. So go subscribe to <a href="https://peopleandblogs.com/">People and Blogs</a>! Go find a personal website and read everything about them! Fall in love with a stranger from a great distance and then go blog weird things about it!</p>
<p>That’s what Tim Berners-Lee would want.</p>
Nuform Type2023-11-23T05:40:26Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/nuform-type/<p>I’ve only just stumbled upon <a href="https://nuformtype.com/">Nuform Type</a> from <a href="http://www.erikmarinovich.com/">Erik Marinovich</a> 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.</p>
<p>I say that because every page of this site has been lovingly designed to showcase the fonts on display and there’s so many fabulous details all over the place. There’s a real playfulness here but there’s clearly been a serious amount of work thrown into it all.</p>
<p>(My favorite of the bunch is <a href="https://nuformtype.com/roko">Roko</a>.)</p>
Help is just help2023-11-14T07:39:10Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/help-is-just-help/<p>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?</p>
<p>Jokes aside, I do tend to see my website as a colossal embarrassment sometimes. Like a letter thrown into the wind or a message pushed into a bottle and left on the shore. Sometimes connections are made— wondrous email threads begin and then abruptly stop—but often this whole blogging business is hard to justify. Who cares what I’m all excited about next? My writing isn’t improving, my...</p>
<p>I know, I know.</p>
<p>The real reason I haven’t returned to this e-garden for a few months is that things have been...off lately. With me. <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/food-and-sleep:-iii/">Food and sleep</a>, again.</p>
<p>This time I’m trying something new though. Usually I just wait until these slumps stop but it’s been more than a year of unnecessary anxiety, more than a year of not being able to rest, of being constantly on edge. More than a year of distractions and not feeling safe despite all the evidence to the contrary.</p>
<p>So I called a doctor, told him what’s up.</p>
<p>I’m struggling to sleep, there’s this persistent hum of social anxiety, and then there’s this underlying terror of...nothing. I’m afraid all the time, always worried. And therapy isn’t working. Neither will eating endless garbage all day and night without end. And earlier this week I caught myself wanting a glass (or two, or three) of wine whilst at work. Not great stuff.</p>
<p>I <em>hated</em> saying this stuff out loud. First, I hate the attention and the subsequent pity. I feel like having these feelings at all is an admission of weakness, of fractured masculinity (I know, yikes). And I assume it has something to do with the fact that where I grew up even talking to a therapist was seen as this foul, disturbed thing. Only broken people do that.</p>
<p>The doctor said that I had really bad anxiety and then he dropped the D word on me. <em>Depressed</em>. Pffft...am I? I make silly jokes all the time! I love my history podcasts! I think about the Roman Empire constantly! I love my little walks around the neighborhood! And, sure, I can’t read a single page of a book without getting bored senseless lately and all I wanna do is eat every single thing in sight all the time until I burst but that doesn’t mean I’m...<em>ugh</em>...that word that shall not be named. Right?</p>
<p>It’s really, truly fucked up that I see “depressed” as a moniker of embarrassment and shame instead of what it really is: a malady, an ailment. If only I was a bit smarter, a bit more caring of others, a bit harder worker, then I wouldn’t have time to be depressed! But this, of all the takes, is the absolute worst.</p>
<p>The doc prescribed an anti-depressant, low dosage, and warned me of the side affects but was very confident it would help. We’ll see. It’s going to be at least a good couple of months until I’ll be able to spot any changes. But what am I hoping for? Less anxiety. I want to be able to hold someone’s gaze. I want the paranoia to steady down a bit. I want to go to bed and read and read and read and then sleep and wake up without feeling like I’ve just fought a wildebeest.</p>
<p>The other day a pal of mine shared a spreadsheet that documented his chronic pain each day, longstanding nerve damage, and you could see over time in just a glance how he had suffered and how in recent months each cell in the sheet was growing slowly redder and redder, the pain more pronounced. I felt terrible for him but it was amazing to me that this is the one thing he could control in this situation. The documentation. But it got me to thinking what the spreadsheet of my moods might look like if I plotted them out over the last few years and then I knew the answer right away.</p>
<p>I have good moments, great moments even. And I’m not sullen or mean, I don’t randomly cry during the day. But the baseline of my moods ain’t healthy. It just needs work though, the right nudge in the right direction.</p>
<p>And I’m really hoping these meds help. But this whole thing has reminded me that it’s time to stop seeing help as this embarrassing thing to ask for, a source of shame.</p>
<p>Help is just help.</p>
Cut the Intro2023-10-22T17:57:37Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/cut-the-intro/<p>Here’s one way to improve the thing you’re writing: cut the intro.</p>
<p>Writing about the symbiosis between trees and mushrooms? Don’t start talking about how humanity has depended on trees since the blah blah blah. Just jump right in! Talking about new features in your app? Don’t start with the fluffy stuff about how excited you are to announce yada yada ya – just tell me what improved.</p>
<p>Boom! The text is lighter, faster, less wasteful.</p>
<p>I get why folks feel the need to add a fluffy intro though. There’s real pressure to make a big deal out of whatever it is and turn everything we write into a thundering manifesto because we have to set up all this context and history, right? Well – no! We absolutely do not and often when we do our writing will mostly suffer for it.</p>
<p>This is something I have to remind myself because it’s so easy to start with something like...</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Since the dawn of history, painting has been an integral part of human existence...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Just tell me about the painting you painted! Get to the good stuff right away and if you feel the need to pad your writing out with fluff then, well, don’t! A big word count doesn’t make things more profound or academic or smart. In fact, most of the time, more words means we didn’t think about something enough. We didn’t cull, cut, and trim.</p>
<p>So: ditch the parade before you get to the good stuff because we need fewer gosh darn manifestos.</p>
<p>(I am looking at you, Robin.)</p>
Design systems, color spaces, and CSS2023-10-15T03:31:33Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/design-systems-color-spaces-and-css/<p>Earlier today I wrote a thing for the ol’ newsletter about <a href="https://robinrendle.com/the-cascade/002-color-me-curious/">which color space you should use in CSS</a> and I mostly focused on background gradients just to explain the core concepts to myself. However! I totally missed this post about <a href="https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/oklch-in-css-why-quit-rgb-hsl">why oklch() is a great go-to choice</a>, written by Andrey Sitnik last year:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Unlike rgb() or hex (#ca0000), OKLCH is human readable. You can quickly and easily know which color an OKLCH value represents simply by looking at the numbers. OKLCH works like HSL, but it encodes lightness better than HSL.</p>
<p>[...] OKLCH, LCH, HSL have values we can set that are much closer to the way people naturally think about colors. OKLCH and LCH contain 3 numbers which, respectively, represent the following: lightness, chroma (or saturation), and hue.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So that would look something like this:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">.element</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">color</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> <span class="token function">oklch</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>0% 0 0 / 50%<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span> <span class="token comment">/* black with 50% opacity */</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>After playing around with it in Codepen a bit, I can see why folks love HSL so much. You can quickly change the hue there without having to go into your color picker or back into a design app or DevTools.</p>
<p>But oklch() has a big advantage over hsl():</p>
<blockquote>
<p>HSL is bad for color modification. Many teams have asked the community to <a href="https://wildbit.com/blog/accessible-palette-stop-using-hsl-for-color-systems">avoid HSL</a> for design system palette generation. Additionally, like RGB and hex, HSL can’t be used to define P3 colors.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m just gonna quote Eugene Fedorenko’s post from that link above:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>While HSL and HSV are fine choices for choosing a single color, they’re not suitable for building a color system, as they simply transform the RGB model and ignore the complexities of human perception. To see what’s wrong with them and find an alternative, we need to look at color theory and consider other color spaces.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Aaand back to that first post:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>OKLCH doesn’t deform the space; it shows the real color space with all its complexity. On one hand, this feature allows us to have predictable lightness values after color transformations and P3 color definition.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Great, wonderful, okay! oklch() seems perfect for creating a color palette in a design system since it’s easier to modify, easier to read, plus it gives you p3 colors to boot.</p>
The Cascade2023-10-06T20:36:26Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-cascade/<p>I’m starting a new project called <a href="https://robinrendle.com/the-cascade/">The Cascade</a>, 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.</p>
<p>But why another newsletter?</p>
<p>Well, I’ve kept my eye off the ball when it comes to CSS over the last few years. There’s just so many improvements and changes to the language that it’s easy to feel out of sync with front-end development in general. And with the death of the bird app, all those developers that I depended on to drag me along with them into the future have scattered to the four winds.</p>
<p>So loving CSS in 2023 feels...lonely.</p>
<p>I also dearly miss the <a href="https://css-tricks.com/newsletters/">CSS-Tricks Newsletter</a> where, for several years, CSS had become my beat. Writing those newsletters every Saturday kept me in the loop, improving my front-end skills slowly over time. It also helped form a community around me where folks were constantly creating wonderful things in browsers and exploring all these thrilling new properties and features of CSS.</p>
<p>With The Cascade I hope to bring back some of that energy whilst also branching out and doing my own thing. It’s gonna be fun, I promise.</p>
<p>Subscribe here, and I’ll see you in the cascade:</p>
<iframe scrolling="no" style="width:100%!important;height:220px;border:1px #ccc solid !important" src="https://buttondown.email/cascade?as_embed=true"></iframe><br /><br />
footer.design2023-10-04T17:38:41Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/footer.design-/<p>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.</p>
<p><a href="https://footer.design/">footer.design</a> is a great collection of footers that shows us how to do them justice. They can be big and bold or bog standard and nondescript. They can be colorful and wild, meandering and meek. There’s so many opportunities in the footer!</p>
<p>And now I must go and make the footers here more fun. To the redesign!</p>
Typographic Malaise2023-09-30T17:33:35Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/typographic-malaise/<p>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.</p>
<p>I notice this rut in my own work, too!</p>
<p>“Doesn’t this new side project look like your old website?” my partner C says to me one night as she looks over my shoulder, not realizing that this one comment has already become a core memory and is beginning to crush me into a tiny dot of shame and embarrassment that I will never recover from.</p>
<p>Perhaps my lack of creativity—my repetition in theme and style and typography—stems from my inability to find the edge of what’s new and exciting. “Bad inputs, bad outputs,” as <a href="https://austinkleon.com/2015/11/12/problems-of-output-are-problems-of-input/">Austin Kleon says</a>.</p>
<p>But then there are moments like this one, right now, where I’m watching <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjJLxHKbgG0&t=39s">this talk by Kateryna Korolevtseva</a> from back in May at ATypI Paris. I have a cup of tea in hand and all of a sudden typography is exciting and dangerous and vital all over again. Kateryna’s talk is all about Ukrainian graphic design and it’s given me a royal kick in the noggin. Just look at what’s possible! Graphic design can be just a bunch of letters thrown around but it can also be this: rebellious and punk and fighting for something worthwhile.</p>
<p>Kateryna’s talk says to me: look, you haven’t seen nothin’ yet. In fact, you’ve barely even scratched the surface. Everything is still possible!</p>
<p>There’s so much wonderful work to point at in the talk but I also can’t keep my eyes off of <a href="https://korolevtseva.com/projects/gartmono">Gart Mono</a>, a typeface by Kateryna. Unfortunately it’s not available just yet as it’s still a work in progress but the moment I can get my hands on this thing I’m going to redesign the hell out of my website.</p>
<p>And oh what a day that will be.</p>
Meta in Myanmar2023-09-30T17:13:24Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/meta-in-myanmar/<p>Erin Kissane just published a fantastic and terrifying piece about Meta’s complicity in <a href="https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setup">the genocide of Rohingya people in Myanmar</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>From far away, I think Meta’s role in the Rohingya crisis can feel blurry and debatable—it was content moderation fuckups, right? In a country they weren’t paying much attention to? Unethical and probably negligent, but come on, what tech company isn’t, at some point?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Later, Erin clarifies that nope, absolutely not:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>They’d been shown example after example of dehumanizing posts and comments calling for mass murder, even explicitly calling for genocide. And David Madden had told Meta staff to their faces that Facebook might well play the role in Myanmar that radio played in Rwanda. Nothing was subtle.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Erin’s work here really is fantastic: setting up the groundwork and context of Myanmar’s relationship with the internet and how it led to a nation’s reliance on Facebook <em>becoming</em> their internet.</p>
Meh2023-09-23T02:01:24Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/meh/<p>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.</p>
<p>What I struggle with most is sharing stuff in a room full of people who don’t care, who aren’t moved, who are simply...indifferent.</p>
<p>That feeling is just the worst because I want folks to be on the edge of their seat! If not moved by the work, then in my performance of it, or even just some vague interest in the problem that I’m trying to solve. Isn’t this a fun puzzle I just shared with you? How would you do it? Doesn’t <em>this</em> thing completely suck? Ugh! Let’s see how I worked my way through it...</p>
<p>These portfolio reviews are tragic to me because they feel like doing standup at an empty bar on a sad, desolate cruise ship. There’s no applause, no playfulness, no back-and-forth. No-one is really there. You’re all alone.</p>
<p>My work might be real bad, of course. My presentation could suck or I might be focusing on the wrong projects, etc. etc. Plus, being on the other side, interviewing folks is boring and tiresome and a distraction from the project you’re working on. Interviews always get in the way and no one is ever, ever excited to do them.</p>
<p>So I get it.</p>
<p>I can’t help feel that terrible feeling of being on a date where you talk to someone for an hour, then two, then three, and afterwards you go home and realize, boy, in all that time they didn’t try once to make a joke. Not even a bad one! There was no attempt to play in the space, to dance in this particular way that I like to dance. And it’s the same thing here: when you’re presenting you can see folks click around on camera, barely giving you 10% of their brain power, and...ugh that sucks so much. I would rather someone tell me that this is wasting their time and log off or storm out of the meeting. I would prefer the rudeness of that than returning to that sad, empty cruise ship.</p>
<p>I hate that feeling, that place, the tragic one-wayness of a conversation. The dead-end.</p>
<p>The only unforgivable quality, for me, is speaking with someone and them not trying to do a bit, not making a reference to a goofy thing they love, not trying to improve this miserable experience we’re both experiencing by being alive on earth in the year 2023. Everything is terrible here—horrible, tragic, truly misery-inducing—but the only way we win against all that is by doing some stupid word play. Right here! Right now! See this: a pun. Or a hint of irony with a wry smile. Just a little something, anything, that is more than just two people breathing in a room for an hour.</p>
<p>You have to <em>contribute</em>, dammit. Anything. Please.</p>
<p>I remember as a kid struggling with this same feeling, of having all this curiosity, all this unbounded excitement, and all these lovely things I want to share and talk about and point to. But then there was nothing on the other end. Isn’t Animorphs just great? Isn’t this movie about this stupid fish funny? Isn’t this thing, this thing right here, isn’t it curious? Look!</p>
<p>Meh. Sure, kid.</p>
<p>I genuinely think the most important fight of my whole dumb life is against this feeling, this emptiness, this apathy. Not just in other people but in myself, too. Because it’s so easy not to care about things! It’s so easy not to try! It’s infinitely easier to walk into a room without twisting what someone says in a new, fun way. It’s so much safer! And I’m sure there were days, weeks, months where I didn’t try to help my conversations putter along in an exciting and dangerous way. I’m sure I’ve done it ten thousand times.</p>
<p>So: I’m sorry. I’ll do better. Every time I feel like saying “meh” I’ll remember this and lean in a little closer.</p>
<p>I’ll be the last guy clapping on that empty cruise.</p>
Metra Ticket Gallery2023-09-21T17:28:57Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/metra-ticket-gallery/<p>Nicholas Rougeux made this <a href="https://www.c82.net/metratickets/">wonderful archive of Metra train tickets</a> from Chicago, and it reaches back more than 50 years. Nicholas just <a href="https://www.c82.net/blog/?id=93">updated the gallery</a>, making it easier to navigate and what not and so I’m embarrassed I’ve never seen this lovely thing before!</p>
<p>I love the designs from back in the 70s like <a href="https://www.c82.net/metratickets/#tickets-1346">this one</a> or <a href="https://www.c82.net/metratickets/#tickets-1369">this one</a>. That colorful overlay style will always make me weak in the knees.</p>
Kobo Libra 22023-09-20T18:18:57Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/kobo-libra-2/<p>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.</p>
<p>Hasn’t every topic, every thought and utterance, already been uttered about ebook readers?</p>
<p>At some point we all agreed that, hey, that whole future-of-the-book conversation was quite silly and it got a little out of hand. Ebooks stalled way back in 2009 and all that promise of a future book stalled with it, so let’s just sweep all those half baked e-readers and our dreams of cool iPad magazines under the bed and never talk about any of this ever again. At least in polite company.</p>
<p>But let me break the pact, if only just for a bit.</p>
<p>A while ago I picked up a <a href="https://uk.kobobooks.com/collections/ereaders/products/kobo-libra-2">Kobo Libra 2</a> and that promise of the future book flashed before my eyes again.</p>
<p>I’ve read everything on this little device: fantasy novels, biographies, cringey and yet somehow endearing love letters from Oscar Wilde, the whole lot. It’s just a great device and about as good as ebook readers can be; it’s so much faster than the competition, it lasts forever, there’s physical buttons to navigate between pages, and you can even load custom fonts on this bad boy! On the first day, and with just a few clicks, I uploaded my trusty <a href="https://www.gt-alpina.com/">GT Alpina</a> and I’ve been happy ever since.</p>
<p>Also, perhaps the best feature: when you set the device down it just shows the last book you were reading. No ads for random flirty romance novels that you don’t care about, no ads for upsetting self-help books. In that way it feels respectful of your time and attention, if only a little bit.</p>
<p>There are some quirks that you have to put up with, sure. Like each ebook has to be manually typeset each time you boot it up. I’m no ebook specialist so maybe those are the settings that come embedded with the file? But you can eventually get great typography on this thing if you tweak it for long enough. So I’ll take that.</p>
<p>Every time I pick this thing up though I can’t help think about that future-of-the-book stuff. The annoying what-if stuff. Like, what if ebooks were just a little better? What if the physical design of the Kobo was a little more Teenage Engineering and less generic, throw-away-able plastic? Where is the fun in the interface? Where is the (ugh) <em>delight</em> in the heft of this thing as an object? Why can’t I quickly pull in every book from Project Gutenberg? Why can’t I navigate the web but in a super-focused, monochromatic way?</p>
<p>Years ago I argued that RSS is the promised land. Not just for the web, but for e-readers too. So I wish this device wasn’t land-locked into a paywalled garden of selling you half-baked text docs called ebooks. I wish RSS was a core part of this device somehow and I wish that connecting with writers wasn’t...like this.</p>
<p>There’s still that hypothetical future-device in my head, a truly beautiful one; a device that builds off the open web, a device that connects you with other readers and writers, bringing in great industrial design and <a href="https://medium.com/digital-humanities/readmill-a-review-c7936e96bbac">all the ideas from Readmill</a> before it tragically died.</p>
<p>That future device bounces around in my head all the time and so, as good as the Kobo Libra 2 might be, it just ain’t that.</p>
<p>But it’s the closest thing we’ve got.</p>
v132023-09-14T23:08:13Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/v13/<p>Today I launched an update to <a href="https://robinrendle.com/">my website</a>! 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.</p>
<p>The goal here was to merge the about and index pages into one since they’re always the same thing anyways and this now saves you a click if you want to learn about me. I also wanted to take things way less seriously—I go through stages of wanting my website to look cool vs. just explain who I am and I think this version captures my scattershot interests better? Also also I wanted to elevate some hidden things, like my essays, which I think stand the test of time a bit.</p>
<p>I heard a lot of feedback from the last version about how folks couldn’t change the theme and so I added the first two simple light/dark modes for now—with more coming soon!—so I simply deleted all the CSS and started again. In the future I’ll play with adding different themes now that everything is nice and variable-ized.</p>
<p>There’s still some polish needed here and there, like the /projects pages and the design of things at smaller sizes (this redesign was a reminder that margins at smaller sizes just do not exist and so it’s hard to be visually playful there).</p>
<p>Perhaps my favorite change is the essays page, giving each entry a lovely woodcut/metal engraving that riffs on the theme. Not every post is handmade but I swore a cursed blood-oath to myself back in 2014 not to delete anything from my website ever again, so I have to live with all the essays, even though some of them are kind of embarrassing at this point. But I am a big believer that a blog should be embarrassing! That’s like half the point of a blog, to be wrong about things ruthlessly, over and over again, to stumble in front of a crowd of strangers and hope that they at least smile at your attempt.</p>
<p>Anyway, that’s about it! I reckon this version will stick around for the rest of the year as I can see a million different ways I can keep busy with polishing things and adding animations and playing with the view transitions API. But we’ll see.</p>
<p>YEAH WE WILL SEE, WON’T WE? DON’T YOU DARE THREATEN ME. I WILL REDESIGN MY WEBSITE AGAIN TODAY JUST TO SPITE YOU. YOU THINK THIS IS A JOKE, DON’T YOU? HUH? HUH???</p>
<p>Wait, where are you goin—</p>
A lot of stuff is just fine.2023-08-31T20:54:57Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/a-lot-of-stuff-is-just-fine./<p>Chris makes a really good point in his reply to <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/why-are-websites-embarrassing/">my post</a>, especially where he says that websites are fine <a href="https://chriscoyier.net/2023/08/31/a-lot-of-stuff-is-just-fine/">out of the box</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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 theme on <a href="http://wordpress.com/">WordPress.com</a> and spin up a simple blog. Do an eCommerce thing on SquareSpace and sell painted pencil erasers. Use an Astro template to build your next media endeavor. They will be very much fine out of the box. Better than fine. Pretty damn decent, really. They get not-fine when we’re like… you know what this article needs? A sticky position ad for Geico right in the middle of it. And if they scroll past that, hit ’em with the newsletter subscribe modal. Anything to keep them from reading the next paragraph or even having any confidence there is a next paragraph to be found.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Squarespace, WordPress, Ghost—these are great examples where you can’t really pick anything wrong and get a bad website out of it.</p>
Processing painful work exits2023-08-31T18:36:21Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/processing-painful-work-exits/<p>Jonas Downey wrote about how he dealt with <a href="https://jonas.do/writing/2022-11-05-processing-painful-work-exits/">his job blowing up</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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 company, I felt invested in its success over many years. I was a vocal champion of our work, and I was proud of it.</p>
<p>[...] Another major challenge I suffered was questioning whether I was even good at my job anymore. After you’ve spent a few years at a company, you’ll develop an internal reputation and institutional knowledge that’s not transferrable anywhere else. When you cut ties, you have to give all of that up and start over.</p>
<p>[...] Remember: you’re clearly very competent, or you wouldn’t have lasted at the job you had. You’ll be competent at the next one too!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m going to kindly ignore that last part since after I left my last gig I felt terrible about my work in design, too. Well, it was bigger than that. I felt like I wasn’t cut out for this career in design at all! I had designed my whole identity around this one particular type of work and the more gigs I applied for and the more I talked to other design teams, the less competent I felt, the less sure of my work I became.</p>
<p>I’m saying this in the past tense but I still feel this way! I’m not sure if I’m good at what I do! And I’m not entirely sure how to deal with those feelings besides ignoring them and staying hopeful or just trying my best to find weird folks with the same kind of enthusiasm.</p>
Why are websites embarrassing?2023-08-29T17:07:16Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/why-are-websites-embarrassing/<p>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 typography inside. They’re not beautiful objects or anything and, sure, the paper is ehhhh and okay yes they’re using the same boring book fonts that you’ve seen ten million times but there’s nothing about these books that get in the way of my reading. So the baseline for modern book design is pretty high.</p>
<p>This made me wonder why the same isn’t true for websites.</p>
<p>The baseline for websites is not great. Okay, fine: most websites are pure, unadulterated, straight-up bad. Bad from top to bottom, bad from left to right. There’s no denying it, as much as I might want to. And I do want to! I want to hold up the field of web design and say that it’s en par with what musicians and painters and everyone else is doing in every other field. I’ve dedicated my life to this thing and so when I find a beautiful website, something that pushes the whole thing forwards, I want to loudly celebrate it.</p>
<p>I truly want every website to be worthy of our browsers.</p>
<p>But modern websites are not worthy. They’re slow, hard to navigate, and plagued with visual crap; pop-ups, bad typography, newsletter modals, and everything else imaginable. And that’s just the baseline. When I use a website on my phone I likely won’t trust it to show me the same information, I won’t trust interactions when I click buttons or fill in forms or even when I try to navigate elsewhere.</p>
<p>I don’t even trust the back button any more.</p>
<p>It’s so bad that visiting a website in 2023 is like falling into a blackhole and being hit by a bunch of random junk on your way to being crushed into an infinite nothing in the center. No, I don’t want to give you permission about cookies, no I don’t want to sign up to your newsletter, no I don’t want to talk with some half-baked chatbot.</p>
<p>No, no, no.</p>
<p>This low bar for web design is what makes me embarrassed to call myself a web designer. If you tell a stranger that you make websites for a living then their first thought is likely “<em>that sounds lame.</em>” Would they think the same of a book designer? Or a graphic designer? They might not be interested, they might yawn, but they wouldn’t be embarrassed for you.</p>
<p>And yet! I do truly believe that a website can be as well designed as any book, just as thoughtful, just as brilliant. Yet in 2023 it feels like we’ve let websites be one of two things: either confused, junky bloatware or simple white posters with black text and a big checkout button. But the web can be so much more!</p>
<p>When I find a website that doesn’t hijack the scroll, or a website with pleasantly sized text, or a website that loads in under 300ms then it makes me bolt upright in my chair. I wonder at what tech they’re using under the hood, what kind of conversations they had in those rooms, I try to imagine what kind of grueling process the team went through to make something so quiet and simple. All the things they had to say no to.</p>
<p>The other day Chris Coyier mentioned that <a href="https://chriscoyier.net/2023/08/01/other-peoples-busted-software-is-an-opportunity/">bad software is an opportunity</a>: if everyone else is making stuff that sucks and you don’t, you’ll have a leg up. And I get that, I think it’s true. If people look at your software as stable and reliable and trustworthy then you’ve already kinda won. But still, I can’t help feel that bad software is also an excuse. Everyone else’s websites don’t load in under 1 second, so why should mine? I don’t use my website on mobile, so who cares for those who do? Fixing this accessibility problem will only help one person, how does that make us money?</p>
<p>It matters because of the baseline! Every decision we make sets expectations of what is acceptable and what ain’t. Every time we say yes to shitty design and inaccessible text inputs we lower the floor for the whole profession, the whole art form of web design. Saying yes to one terrible new analytics script opens the door to ten thousand more.</p>
<p>So why is web design embarrassing? Why is the floor so low? And why do folks not see the web the same way I do, as a place to be treasured and cared for in the same way as a beautiful book?</p>
<p>I have two reasons beyond the obvious answers.</p>
<p>First, I think great web design requires discipline. And that’s really the hardest thing about making a website. In this field there are a thousand yes’s for every no because, and here’s the second reason: it’s impossible to hold a website in your hand. It’s hard and sometimes tedious to see all the variations of your work across the infinitude of devices and circumstances that might touch your site. When making a website it sometimes feel like you’re thinking in four dimensions instead of three.</p>
<p>But really the baseline of web design is so low because there’s a lack of tenderness, care, and empathy. It’s because we don’t see the making of a website as a worthy profession. It’s because we hope to squeeze the last bit of juice from the orange by mulching people in between modals and pop ups and cookie banners.</p>
<p>So how do we do better? How do we take better care of our websites?</p>
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère2023-08-17T22:59:41Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/a-bar-at-the-folies-bergere/<p><em>Daemon Voices</em> 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 <em>“And When Did You Last See Your Father?”</em> painted in 1878 by William Frederick Yeames.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/last-see-father.webp" alt="“And When Did You Last See Your Father?” by William Frederick Yeames" /></p>
<p>According to Philip, you can describe everything here in English and nothing will be lost. The little boy on the stool, the soldier comforting the child, that sort of thing. You can imagine this story told in paint or in words since there’s a scene happening, a straightforward story to tell, and so it doesn’t really matter what medium you use to tell it.</p>
<p>But then there are paintings like <em>A Bar at the Folies-Bergère</em> by Édouard Manet in 1882. These are the paintings that question and poke and prod us, the sort of paintings that escape description, escape language somehow. It’s a scene that only works as a painting and couldn’t possibly be translated back into words no matter how hard you try.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/the-bar.webp" alt="A Bar at the Folies-Bergère by Édouard Manet" /></p>
<p>Philip writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All those great artists are contemporaries, not only of one another but of us too. Art does not progress by improving what came before, by doing to it what chemistry did to alchemy: art does not progress in that sense at all. Great art has always had this double character, this ability to look at the world and to look at itself at the same time, and the greatest art is perhaps where we see the two things in perfect balance.</p>
<p>That’s the real difference between <em>A Bar at the Foiles-Bergère</em> and <em>“And When Did You Last See Your Father?”</em> Yeames and all the other Victorian narrative painters were only interested in half of what there was to be interested about. Manet was interested in all of it. <em>A Bar at the Folies-Bergère</em> is about a bar at the Folies-Bergère; it’s about the mystery of that unfathomable expression on this ordinary young woman’s face; it’s about those legs suspended at the very end of the acrobat’s swing; it’s about champagne and oranges and tobacco smoke and chandeliers and fashionable dress; but it’s also about seeing, and about recording the way the light glistens on those oranges, and the way things in a mirror are different from things in front of our eyes; it’s about the sensation of sight and the mysteries of representation; it’s about painting itself.</p>
</blockquote>
Type Revival for Film & TV2023-08-16T16:24:08Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/type-revival-for-film-&-tv/<p>Here’s <a href="https://www.lspencerstudio.com/">Leah Spencer</a> writing for Alphabettes about <a href="https://www.alphabettes.org/type-revival-for-film-tv/">her fabulous work as a graphic designer</a> for film and TV. Her job is to create all the typographic objects that you might see in a show like <em>The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel</em> 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:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As a Graphic Designer for Film & TV, I work in the art department and create anything that is seen on screen with text and or imagery, such as storefront signs, food packaging, patterned wallpaper, stacks of bills, newspapers, lost cat flyers, or even children’s drawings. The range of items we create is incredibly broad, and the cool thing about that is it reframes graphic design from an exclusive, professional pursuit into a universal human activity. If everything is design, everyone is a designer. So instead of creating as “Leah Spencer, graphic designer,” I have to create as a shopkeeper, as a sign painter, as a college student, as an accountant, and so on.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The whole post is great, as Leah walks through her process for taking type from old specimens, throwing them into Photoshop, and transforming them into fonts she can reuse. It’s all frustratingly beautiful work.</p>
<p>Also: ugh. Even <a href="https://www.lspencerstudio.com/resume">Leah’s resume</a> completely rules.</p>
Where the gaps are2023-08-14T15:58:38Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/where-the-gaps-are/<p>I’ve been iterating on <a href="https://robinrendle.com/projects">my portfolio</a> 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.</p>
<p>Here’s the before and after:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/projects-old.webp" alt="My old portfolio that was a humble list pointing to each post" /><br />
<img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/projects-new.webp" alt="My new portfolio with a timeline that allows you to scroll back through all my work" /></p>
<p>It’s certainly not perfect but it’s certainly a lot better than a straightforward list. Be kind to the the HTML though! I had to do some completely bananas things in there that would make <a href="https://adactio.com/">Jeremy</a> wince so please do not go spelunking into the code. Later today I’ll get around to polishing all that horridness under the hood but for now I just needed a prototype to test things out in the browser.</p>
<p>And it feels pretty nice! I like being able to scan over my work and, instead of bragging about stuff, it’s handy to see where the gaps are. There’s all sorts of things I haven’t worked on yet, types of projects I’ve avoided, skills I haven’t yet developed—and this page now makes that clearer than ever.</p>
<p>This portfolio is also a good reminder of a few places where I’ve slipped up over the years. Career hiccups, if you will. You won’t? Rude.</p>
<p>Look, as a designer, you should always be building your portfolio. That sounds lame and boring but you need to make sure you record everything; copy all your docs from your design tool of choice and keep a private record of every SVG and napkin sketch. Ensure that you have all those high definition assets stored safe for later because you’ll eventually need them. Oh and keep things organized! Treat your portfolio as you would any client project (I’m especially bad at this).</p>
<p>Also, every project that disappears off the face of the earth or every project that isn’t good enough or doesn’t eventually ship can hurt you in the future. I’ve spent <em>years</em> working on projects that don’t ship and this looks bad on you in interviews. That’s incredibly stupid, yes, but it’s how design interviews work. If you think a team or a project is a dead-end then you need to jump ship as politely as possible. Not just for your mental health, but also for future gigs you want to apply to.</p>
<p>Because your portfolio is the door and the key. It opens and unlocks all the future possibilities in your career, and in this jerk’s opinion it’s the second most valuable asset we have besides a blog. Your portfolio can be plain spoken, or silly, or magnificent, gargantuan and hulking, with in-depth case studies and fantastic animations. That doesn’t really matter though. You just need to tend to your portfolio every once and while, it’ll pay off eventually.</p>
<p>Because yes, me, I’m looking squarely at you. You need to take care of your portfolio so that, at some point in the future, it can take care of you.</p>
Marmite Defontes2023-08-11T16:41:47Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/marmite-defontes/<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/marmite-1.webp" alt="A screenshot of the Marmite Defontes homepage" /></p>
<p>Guillaume Berry just launched a new site for the type foundry <a href="https://marmitedefontes.com/">Marmite Defontes</a> 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 any other quality of a cool website. I am taking furious notes.</p>
<p>Another detail I love besides the sheer speed of this site is how each page has a distinct, bright color, making every page feel like a card that you’ve zoomed into from the homepage. I expect that once the View Transitions API gets more steam then this sort of zoomable UI is going to be real common on the web. Everything will soon be cards.</p>
<p>But look! So much lovely stuff to oogle at, even when the foundry is just getting started:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/marmite-2.webp" alt="A screenshot of the Marmite Defontes website" /><br />
<img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/marmite-3.webp" alt="A screenshot of the Marmite Defontes website" /></p>
<p>Marmite Defontes has three fonts available now: Kuiper, Piggle, and Snacks. My favorite of the bunch has to be the Piggle family, first for the name and second for the subclass within it being called Puff—cheeky block letters with a playful kick here and there.</p>
<p>The lowercase e is a good example of just how charming and odd this typeface gets. One variant has a small lump in the counter space, as if it’s smiling like a six year old:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/marmite-4.webp" alt="A screenshot of the Marmite Defontes website" /></p>
<p>Also can I rant about trial fonts for a sec? As I’ve been working on a freelance design project I’ve noticed that a lot of foundries don’t offer trial fonts at all—probably for good reasons that are entirely logical to them—but for us web designers it just encourages us to go with the safest option from Google Fonts. Let me use your fonts! Trust your customers not to be jerks! Gimme trial fonts so that I can see if your typeface is the right fit for this project!</p>
<p>That’s exactly what Marmite Defontes has done here, where they offer full versions of the font <a href="https://marmitedefontes.com/information/trial-fonts">as a trial</a>. I have no data to back this up (type designers get in touch!) but I believe that this improves the likelihood of us buying your fonts.</p>
<p>Anywho, if you’re as excited as I am to see what Berry is up to next, don’t forget to subscribe to <a href="https://marmitedefontes.substack.com/">the newsletter</a>.</p>
Shufflin’2023-08-09T15:15:55Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/shufflin/<p>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.”</p>
<h3 id="i." tabindex="-1">i. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/shufflin/#i." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>I’ve replaced everything with Söhne, my typographic kudzu: I spotted these beautiful letters a few months ago and every time I return to them they grow on me a little more. Which is odd since because Helvetica was everywhere growing up, I’ve never looked kindly upon neo-grotesques. Every poster and movie and every logo and website used some flavor of Helvetica. As a budding designer, it felt like Helvetica was a problem, an antagonist, the typographic equivalent of a lazy metaphor that’s best avoided.</p>
<p>If you put Helvetica right up next to Söhne then most folks probably wouldn’t notice the difference. And yet...Söhne is still a constant surprise. It has this warmth and elegance that is especially <a href="https://klim.co.nz/">Klim</a>, capturing the printed feeling of Akzidenz-Grotesk—the great grandfather of Helveticas.</p>
<p style="font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial;">Here’s a paragraph set in Helvetica Neue. A lot of folks argue about the differences between Arial and Helvetica and the Neue version but it’s all the same to me. There’s a mechanical bite, maybe even a lack of humanity in these shapes. There’s nothing to point to exactly, it’s more a gut feeling.</p>
<p>See how the difference is so slight between these two paragraphs and yet you can feel it, right? Maybe it’s in the letter spacing. Either way, I hear chalkboards screeching when paragraphs of text are set in the Helveticas. Söhne is somehow more graceful and kinder on the eyes: I can read it all day long and still want to read more.</p>
<h3 id="ii." tabindex="-1">ii. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/shufflin/#ii." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>You might notice maps in a few places—in the header, in the footer—and that’s all stolen from these old maps of the Bay Area, preserved by <a href="https://digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu/record/59124#?xywh=-13426%2C-2631%2C40650%2C17258&cv=">Berkeley Library Digital Collections</a> which has a fabulous URL: <a href="https://digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu/record/59124">https://digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu/record/59124</a>. Just look at that bad boy! That’s a URL you can trust to have some real nerdy stuff inside.</p>
<p>This proves Henry’s point about <a href="https://front-end.social/@henry/110787420208650070">what makes for a cool website</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the coolness of the url is inversely proportional to the coolness of the web project. the best website you'll ever find is gonna be something like libra.v2.progrecali.edu/oct2023/dept/manifesto.html, but going to etherzone.ooo or, say, x.com will be the worst experience of your life</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Anyway, I’ve added maps here because I wanted to capture something about the Bay Area that I haven’t seen in websites. Like, when you pick up a book about the history of London you’ll see flags and crumpets or some such visual motifs but the Bay Area? Besides the bridge and some other cheesy stuff it’s kinda hard to know how to represent that this place is home for me. Anyway, I’m gonna keep working on those visual hints over time since here I’ve sort of made my website look like a BDSM website dedicated to the work of David Fincher.</p>
<h3 id="iii." tabindex="-1">iii. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/shufflin/#iii." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>I’ve added a new <a href="https://robinrendle.com/projects/">projects section</a> which is sort of like a portfolio but really it’s just all the work I want to brag about. This’ll eventually include everything from tiny projects with friends, to medium-sized freelance gigs, to enormous, months-long projects at my day job.</p>
<p>It took me ages to figure out what I wanted this to be. I looked at all sorts of portfolios for inspiration; <a href="https://lynnandtonic.com/">Lynn’s</a>, <a href="https://www.jessicaharllee.com/work/etsy-web-toolkit/">Jessica’s</a>, <a href="https://kevinclark.ca/">Kevin’s</a>, and the overwhelming and yet incredible case studies of <a href="https://heckhouse.com/work/medium/">Bethany Heck</a>.</p>
<p>Eventually I figured that I just want to show a few pics and a quick snippet of a description. These might become more visually impressive over time but for now I just wanted to have an archive of work somewhere. Next I’ll iterate on that list page because it should probably pack more of a punch.</p>
<h3 id="iv." tabindex="-1">iv. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/shufflin/#iv." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>I think it was maybe the fourth or fifth redesign of this website where I realized I had to stop. Blowing everything up and starting again doesn’t really make much sense and would lead to me not pushing updates to my site for months at a time. I would mix up CMS refactors with smaller typographic changes and this would stall everything and make it so much harder to make any kind of progress.</p>
<p>I needed to see my website differently, as a constantly evolving thing, something I can keep pushing in a direction over the years and keep refining over time. Like with this reshuffle I kept the header the same but everything went dark mode. I kept most of the copy of the /about page the same. Same goes for /essays. But then I completely changed all the typesetting for /notes.</p>
<p>This is the way to build a personal site, I realize now; slowly, small-ly, iteratively.</p>
brr2023-08-06T16:43:19Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/brr/<p>I’ve been really enjoying <a href="https://brr.fyi/">brr</a>, a blog from a chap who works in IT at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. They write about basically everything, from <a href="https://brr.fyi/posts/sunset">hunkering down for winter</a>...</p>
<blockquote>
<p>South Pole Station sits at near-exactly 90° South latitude. Down here, the sun does weird things. This leads to strange but accurate sentences, such as “can you believe it – only 4 more days until sunset”.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>...to the strange and curious <a href="https://brr.fyi/posts/doors-of-mcmurdo">doors</a> on the station:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This is not a master-planned community. Rather, it is a series of organic responses to evolving operational needs.</p>
<p>The buildings reflect this patchwork approach. Each building has its own unique style, based on when it was built, the standards at the time, the parties involved in its construction and operation, and what role it plays in town.</p>
<p>Nothing more clearly illustrates this than the doors to the buildings.</p>
</blockquote>
Dark mode in the ancient world2023-08-06T15:14:30Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/dark-mode-in-the-ancient-world/<p>Whoa, <a href="https://maya.land/responses/2023/08/01/dark-mode-in-the-ancient-world.html">@maya</a>. I’ve never heard of a black Book of Hours like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hours,_Morgan_MS_493">this one</a> before. What an absurdly beautiful thing:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The lettering is inscribed in silver and gold and placed within borders ornamented with flowers, foliage and grotesques, on pages dyed a deep blueish black.</p>
</blockquote>
On successor states and websites2023-07-29T15:39:37Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/on-successor-states-and-websites/<p>This piece by Dr Eleanor Janega <a href="https://going-medieval.com/2023/07/26/on-successor-states-and-websites/">on successor states and websites</a> 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:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We are living through a tiny little change in a form of communication, but it can help us understand how larger systems fail. It can also help us to understand how these failures effect regular people who are just trying to go about their daily life. It can also help us learn about how source survival fails at times like this. When people decide to “shake things up” and break a system, you can lose all of the information that they were storing very quickly. This goes for people who get annoyed and delete their twitter accounts just as much as if the whole thing just falls over one day and we lose the records of it. All it takes is one jerk and suddenly a thousand years from now they’ll say you were living through a Dark Age.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I haven’t read anything by Dr Janega before but her writing is immediately good and feathery light, so now I’m off to rummage through the archives of her work and pick up <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-once-and-future-sex-going-medieval-on-women-s-roles-in-society-eleanor-janega/18507010?ean=9780393867817">her book</a>.</p>
Writing Tools2023-07-24T02:36:57Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/writing-tools/<p>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 that the best writing always ends in crescendo, rewarding the reader for getting to the final word. Through experimenting I eventually figured out that the best way to force that orchestral ending is to write the ending as you normally would and then mercilessly cut chunks out of it and rearrange the pieces, hoping to find the best ending that’s hidden in there, hoping to find that satisfying <em>thump</em>.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/writing-tools-10th-anniversary-edition-55-essential-strategies-for-every-writer-roy-peter-clark/108769?ean=9780316014991&ref=https%3A%2F%2Froypeterclark.com%2F&source=IndieBound&title=Writing+Tools+%2810th+Anniversary+Edition%29%3A+55+Essential+Strategies+for+Every+Writer"><em>Writing Tools</em></a>, Roy Peter Clark outlines techniques to improve your writing like that above but organizes them, puts them in stark relief, and makes them memorable. It’s certainly one of the best books about writing that I’ve picked up.</p>
<p>On ending things with a thump, Clark writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Don’t bury your ending. Put your hand over the last paragraph. Ask yourself, “What would happen if this ended here?” Move it up another paragraph and ask the same question until you find the natural stopping place.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s advice like this I wish I had found in university because it’s actionable stuff, unlike the kind of writing advice you hear like “never place your writing desk in front of a window” which I remember from Stephen King. (I like my window! Leave it alone!)</p>
<p>There’s a lot of handy writing tips besides that in <em>Writing Tools</em>, including “write what you fear” which is also something I’ve tried to follow for years without putting a name to it. But a lot of Roy’s tools in this book are novel to me, for example this snippet that I want to tack up on my office wall:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>At the <em>St. Petersburg Times</em>, editors and writing coaches warn reporters not to return to the office without “the name of the dog.” That reporting task does not require the writer to use the detail in the story, but it reminds the reporter to keep her eyes and ears opened.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And, of course:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Some adjectives—<em>ashen, blond,</em> and <em>winged</em>—help us see. But adjectives such as <em>enthusiastic</em> are abstract nouns in disguise.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>(Thanks for recommending this lovely book, <a href="https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/feeling-of-something-waiting-there-for-you/">Robin</a>.)</p>
Guide Guide2023-07-21T14:50:25Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/guide-guide/<p>I love everything about <a href="https://guideguide.me/">Guide Guide</a> by <a href="https://cameronmcefee.com/">Cameron McEfee</a>—it’s a plugin for design tools that allows you to create complex grid systems real easy. On the website, Cameron writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We’ve gone soft. Our modern design tools, great as they are, hold our hands in the direction of what is easy to build and optimize. They deprioritize whack-ass ideas that scare product managers but are cool as sh*t when someone has the audacity to make them work.</p>
<p>GuideGuide raises a middle finger to tools that limit creative potential. If you’re a designer that wants to do work that is different from the rest, GuideGuide will help you do it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’ve always loved how Cameron writes. The whole website is so well written in fact that even <a href="https://guideguide.me/documentation">the documentation</a> makes for a fun and pleasant read.</p>
What’s Next?2023-07-20T16:31:55Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/whats-next/<p>I’ve been thinking about what I want from a new gig.</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Lately too much of my time has been spent working alone, making things in a bubble, pitching ideas in isolation. It’s pretty lonely! How do I fix that?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>What I want is a co-conspirator and mentor again. Someone who kicks my ass and pushes my designs and prototypes, my nascent coding and writing skills. I want someone who can open my eyes, show me the way.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>It’s shocking how many bad jobs are out there. I don’t expect to build something that changes millions of lives but I’d like to contribute to a worthy cause and not join a company that happens to be a leader in the <em>Dao-based multiplayer AI top-of-funnel consumer business market</em>. I reckon that requires me to have the guts to say no to a lot of stuff, even if that’s a terrible idea for my financial health. But my parents always chased easy cash throughout my childhood and watching that taught me a valuable lesson: <em>never follow the money</em>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The problem with joining a big company is that you have no idea what the team dynamics are. Sometimes you can talk to the leads of that team but you really have no idea what working with them will feel like once the OKRs start flying around. Is the team healthy? Are they competent and reasonable? And, most importantly, are they funny?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>I don’t wanna jump around from team to team or company to company. I want to be on a problem for like 5 years straight. That’s a solid amount of time to learn how things get done.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>With big companies there’s more stability but you and your team can get lost in the yearly re-org. There’s more politics. Decisions are so much harder to make. But then there’s this opportunity to build something enormous and slap your name on it. You get to unfurl the curtain and reveal how this enormous software factory works, and that’s always exciting. Big companies also open doors by connecting you with so many people. Then again, they also attract middle managers like a family of hungry bears to a river.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Yet small companies might not last long! Sure, you could take a chance on this tiny company but are they gonna be around next year? Do they make any money? Or is this company fueled by the delirious hopes of VC firms hoping to get something out of it soon?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>I realize the biggest threat to small businesses like, say, a freelance web design shop that I might start, is health insurance. I know, I know. Saying this is boring and stressful as all hell and not useful at all. But the healthcare system in America is a misnomer—there is no such thing. Instead of a healthcare system there is only a violent and colossal bureaucracy in its place. Every insurance company is a leech upon the body politic and everyone in between medicine and me is an accomplice. The dystopian healthcare system limits us all from our potential, limits our freedoms and life choices.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Maybe I should go back to freelancing? Healthcare aside, there’s also weeks and months of anxiety and shame when nothing comes in. Plus, I don’t really have a huge network of folks I could buzz and start getting good work leads. Last time I did freelance work I had to say yes to a bunch of stuff that I wasn’t proud of, projects that will be forever buried.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>I wanna make websites like my essays all day long; big, rambly things that feel punk rock and aren’t just machines for generating clicks and eyeballs. But is there really a market for work like that? The big scrolly-like things for the NYT and its ilk feel like they’re going out of fashion. But maybe I can take those skills and apply them elsewhere?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>I’ve always worked best on teams of three or four people. Any more than that and you need managers and quarterly goals and all the horseshit that comes with large numbers of people. At a small scale, a team can be more nimble than a thousand mismanaged folks—they can work like a tiny little squadron behind enemy lines without the need for backup or artillery support.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>I love it when a team <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/i-don%E2%80%99t-believe-in-sprints/">doesn’t have a backlog</a>. When you’re in a room with a bunch of smart folks and they all can collectively decide what the next most important thing is right away. And then just do the darn thing.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>No more working weekends, no more working late at night. I did well with that at my last gig and hope to keep that up. Having that boundary is vital and anyone who says that you gotta work hard to play hard simply doesn’t know what good, valuable work looks like.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>I hate meetings. Most of the time they’re a complete waste of time. On small and nimble teams they’re brief enough but I’d like to work on projects that don’t require constant in-person chats because eventually you spend your entire day socializing and I dunno! I don’t like that! If I haven’t made anything at the end of the day or made any kind of progress at all then I feel <em>stressed</em> and <em>terrible</em>.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>I want to work on something exciting. Now, exciting for me is boring for a lot of other folks but what I mean is that there’s nothing more bleak than turning to someone in a fit of excitement and them giving you a bored look. Or, worse; having no one to show your stuff to. That kills me and makes me wanna walk right in the ocean. I want my excitement to be shared.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>I want to feel like I’m doing a lil mutiny everyday.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>What about returning to design systems work again? Eh. You have to spend half your time convincing folks that your job is worth doing. It’s exhausting being in a room talking about buttons for the thousandth time this week and when management suddenly changes their minds about how stuff should look then they expect you to do a shit ton of work in a hilariously short period of time. Design systems work is always under-staffed, under-appreciated, and tends to only be feasible at large companies where you’ll spend a lotta time in meetings explaining that you already have a design system and, no, you don’t need to build it again from scratch. Most people spend more time talking about what to call a design system than actually workin’ on the design system and god this all sounds exhausting to me. Perhaps I’m just not built for it.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>What about dedicated front-end work? Hmmmm. That kinda work has paid the bills in the past but if we’re being real honest here then I’m not a good developer. Good prototyper? Maybe! But when it comes to engineering high quality interfaces at scale then I don’t have the patience to learn how Typescript is doing this one goofy ass thing today and fiddling with a framework isn’t what I want to do. At least in my experience it becomes very repetitive work anyway.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>I want to push my design skills, ideally. I think I’m better at the graphic design of website-making and less so at the product side of things. That would usually push me into the role of a "growth designer" and dear lord what a depressing thing to slap onto your resume. I wanna make websites and write, not stare at graphs all day long and argue about how if we moved this one button here then sales would go up by 0.3% in the southern territories in Q2. All of that sounds pretty lame! Sorry!</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Another product design gig? I think so? I’m starting to improve my skills there. The problem, generally, is that to do great product design work you have to be <em>very</em> political. You have to push back on the original brief and gather consensus at the leadership level. But that’s super stressful, and is what almost killed me at my last gig. I’ll just obsess over what the CEO or CTO think about my buttons and that will give me shingles and make me want to cry over lunch.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>I worked at a huge converted factory in the Dogpatch district a few years ago. The building used to build ships and this company comes around a hundred years later and fills it with plants and neon signs and beautiful chairs. It was stunning. But it was impossible to think in a space like that; I could hear what someone was saying on the other side of the office.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>A company could spend $10 million on an office and it will still suck compared to what I can make with a few things from Ikea.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>So I want to work from home. Offices contain endless distractions and get inbetween me and the work. Plus, being able to run to the bakery and randomly pick up some bread in the middle of the work day is a Caligulan luxury I refuse to let go of.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The one invaluable thing about office work is brainstorming. But you only need 1 day a week tops for that. Any more and you’re just wasting everyone’s time.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>So product design at a small company then? Fewer than a hundred employees? Somewhere without the politics, somewhere I can work remotely, somewhere I can work with smart and funny people on something that feels dazzling but isn’t a VC-funded dystopian nightmare.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>I want to build stuff that I can brag about. Small details that shine. Stuff you can blog about.</p>
</li>
</ul>
These Handsome Young Men2023-07-12T22:47:52Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-handsome-men/<p>I’m teleported back in time 200 years to the warmth of Morse code and folded letters as I walk in the door—I can almost see the haberdasheries and cobblestone paths that crowd the outside world through the windows as I turn back to close it—because here I am safely in the past; beautiful suits line the walls of this small room and three preposterously handsome men in green and grey and black turn to welcome me in.</p>
<p>I am here for my first tailor-made suit.</p>
<p>Shaking their hands in turn, still stunned by the industrial beauty of these young men, and now, as they offer me an espresso, I am suddenly/extremely/painfully aware of the golf pants I’m wearing from Target (my god these pants are so comfortable though — the big secret of men’s fashion was golf pants all along, who knew?).</p>
<p>These handsome boys are here to tell me how to see fabrics and textiles — see this, how the fabric almost bends in the light? Or this one, where the gray is only visible in the flannel when a photograph is taken? — and they handsomely ask me questions about the big day. Where am I from? Where am I getting married? What color? How many pieces in the suit?</p>
<p>England, I tell them. San Francisco City Hall. Green. Three.</p>
<p>Ah! One of them turns on his polished heel and briefly disappears. (The leather on this couch is so comfortable, it must’ve been the chair that James Buchanan lounged on after signing the Pacific Telegraph Act of 1860.) The handsome young man returns from the back and says, ah, this flannel is from the United Kingdom. That would be a nice touch, eh?</p>
<p>I point at a few fabrics I like, and the handsome men excitedly stick pins into them for safekeeping. We agree on a date for measurements and I shake their hands as confidently as I can muster before stepping outside where the 21st century is ready and waiting to knock me flat on my ass. The noise and the bluster! The concrete shapes! Cars, cars, cars!</p>
<p>Across the street is a little cafe, perfect for recovering from two centuries of time travel and a safe space for caffeinated work.</p>
Parallax2023-07-05T17:46:43Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/parallax/<p>A blog is for loving things whole-heartedly and so I must inform you that I love Parallax by Atlas Sound.</p>
<p>It’s an album that I come back to once a year and it reminds me of cold, snowy days at uni (was there really snow? That doesn’t sound quite right...). Either way, this album reminds me of learning how to panic-design in my dorm, of brisk morning walks to campus, of being optimistic and hopeful when nothing felt worthy of hope. These songs remind me of the kitchen that I read in, the kitchen with the windows that opened up to a little lane surrounded by bright green fields and red-brick buildings.</p>
<p>Parallax was the soundtrack whilst I plodded around in the dark at night being mopey as hell, walking back and forth to the bus station or slouching my way to the cinema in the dark. These were the songs that I listened to when I took the train down to see my dad get out of hospital and those I bopped my head to whilst I crawled back home in a drunken stupor from some failed something or other, singing and singing...</p>
<pre class="language-md"><code class="language-md">How many fantasies were interrupted by<br />A thousand galaxies, drifting by?</code></pre>
<p>Listening to these songs now, more than a dozen years later, sure is strange. They were the perfect songs to be sad to, the perfect soundtrack to plodding around the UK whilst I figured things out. But now these songs don’t feel quite so mythical and important to me as they once did. It’s not I grew out of these songs or the style is tired—it still feels like a brand new album—but there’s so many memories bound to these songs that...well...</p>
Seven Gigabytes2023-06-24T17:09:33Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/seven-gigabytes/<p>Paul Ford <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/my-fathers-death-in-7-gigabytes-internet-archive/">archived his father’s poetry and writing</a>, uploading it to the Internet Archive:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My father’s last decade was one of relentless downsizing, from apartment to assisted living to nursing home, shedding belongings, throwing away clothes and furniture. And at the end: Two boxes and a tiny green urn. The ultimate zip file. After I parsed and processed and batched his digital legacy, it came to 7,382 files and around 7 gigabytes.</p>
<p>The sum of Frank took two days and nights to upload to the Internet Archive, at a rate of a few files per minute. I wonder what the universe will make of this bundle of information. Who will care? Scholars of short plays about the Korean War? Sociologists studying 1930s Irish childhoods? I am sure his words will be ingested, digested, and excreted as chat by untold bots and search engines. Perhaps they’ll be able to make sense of all the modernist imagery. At least he’ll have slowed them down a little. In time, we all end up in a folder somewhere, if we’re lucky. Frank belongs to the world now; I released the files under Creative Commons 0, No Rights Reserved. And I know he would have loved his archive.</p>
</blockquote>
Update2023-06-23T23:57:28Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/update-day/<p>Fixed a few things around these parts today; I started using <a href="https://www.underware.nl/fonts/fakir/preface">Fakir</a> for headings and tidied up a lot of stuff on smaller screens. The biggest change is that the headings now change size depending on the width of the container that they’re in, like this:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">.title-wrapper</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">container-type</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> inline-size<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><br /><span class="token selector">.title-wrapper h1</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-size</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 15cqw<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>One of the problems with this type of responsive heading is that I want the size of the text to change depending on the number of words in the title. So if a title is small—like “Analog”—then I want that to be enormous, but if the title is real long—“Questionable Best Practices in Modern Front-end Development”—then I want the text to scale down a bit and fit in a reasonable space.</p>
<p>But after all these years, it looks there’s no good way to responsively set the font-size of big headings without knowing the exact number of words or letters in them. We’ve got <code>rem</code>, <code>vw</code>, and now <code>cqw</code> units but none of them work precisely the way I want them to.</p>
<p>So I’m kinda forced to write a bunch of logic that takes into consideration...</p>
<ul>
<li>Small, one-word titles that need to be monstrously big</li>
<li>Long, one word titles that need to be medium-sized</li>
<li>Real long sentences that need to be smallish-sized to fit</li>
</ul>
<p>That convinced me that I should just write a whole bunch of hacky JavaScript that detects how many words and letters are in the <code>h1</code> and then slaps a CSS class on it:</p>
<pre class="language-javascript"><code class="language-javascript"><span class="token keyword">const</span> title <span class="token operator">=</span> document<span class="token punctuation">.</span><span class="token function">querySelectorAll</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token string">"#heading"</span><span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">[</span><span class="token number">0</span><span class="token punctuation">]</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token keyword">const</span> titleLetters <span class="token operator">=</span> title<span class="token punctuation">.</span>textContent<span class="token punctuation">.</span>length<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token keyword">const</span> titleWords <span class="token operator">=</span> title<span class="token punctuation">.</span>textContent<span class="token punctuation">.</span><span class="token function">trim</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">.</span><span class="token function">split</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token regex"><span class="token regex-delimiter">/</span><span class="token regex-source language-regex">\s+</span><span class="token regex-delimiter">/</span></span><span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">.</span>length<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><br /><span class="token keyword">if</span> <span class="token punctuation">(</span>titleLetters <span class="token operator">></span> <span class="token number">15</span><span class="token punctuation">)</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> title<span class="token punctuation">.</span>classList<span class="token punctuation">.</span><span class="token function">add</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token string">"title-long"</span><span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><br /><span class="token keyword">if</span> <span class="token punctuation">(</span>titleLetters <span class="token operator">></span> <span class="token number">10</span><span class="token punctuation">)</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> title<span class="token punctuation">.</span>classList<span class="token punctuation">.</span><span class="token function">add</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token string">"title-medium"</span><span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><br /><span class="token keyword">if</span> <span class="token punctuation">(</span>titleLetters <span class="token operator">></span> <span class="token number">8</span> <span class="token operator">&&</span> titleWords <span class="token operator"><</span> <span class="token number">2</span><span class="token punctuation">)</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> title<span class="token punctuation">.</span>classList<span class="token punctuation">.</span><span class="token function">remove</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token string">"title-short"</span><span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> title<span class="token punctuation">.</span>classList<span class="token punctuation">.</span><span class="token function">remove</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token string">"title-medium"</span><span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> title<span class="token punctuation">.</span>classList<span class="token punctuation">.</span><span class="token function">add</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token string">"title-quite-long"</span><span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>I’m sure there’s a better way to do this but, hey, it works fine for now.</p>
<p>I had a lot of hacky fun making the headings work across different screen sizes although it’s a bit frustrating that there’s no way in CSS to make a relationship between the number of words in a sentence and the size of the text. Also, having so many ways length values to set the font-size definitely adds to <a href="https://robinrendle.com/newsletter/the-staggering-frontiers-of-css/">that feeling of overwhelmingness</a> when it comes to writing CSS.</p>
<p>I don’t want yet another value in CSS—<code>cqw</code> works well enough for me. But I really wish there was some way to do this CSS alone. Something like...</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">.element:letters(<5)</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-size</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 10cqw<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><br /><span class="token selector">.element:words(> 2)</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-size</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 15cqw<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p><code>:letters()</code> and <code>:words()</code> is perhaps a little silly and maybe it’s super not performant to do this with CSS alone but the idea is sound to me. It’s sorta like a media query, I guess.</p>
<p>Anyway, lemme know what ya think about the new design of this here website. I’m sure there’s all sorts of kinks I’ll need to smooth out this weekend.</p>
Typography is a service, not an art2023-06-14T20:39:26Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/typography-is-a-service-not-an-art/<p>I never liked <a href="https://klim.co.nz/retail-fonts/untitled-sans/">Untitled Sans</a> or its brother, Untitled <a href="https://klim.co.nz/retail-fonts/untitled-serif/">Serif</a>. There was a sort of anti-design-designer thing going on with them. They screamed “I am extremely from New York City” for some reason, as if they were designed for ugly billboards that legally require a generic sans. They weren’t beautiful or striking or unique or new to me and so I thought, what’s the point of this?</p>
<p>I judged them in the harshest way imaginable: I just shrugged and then forgot about them.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/untitled.webp" alt="A screenshot of Untitled Sans, taken from Klim Type’s website" /></p>
<p>But now, returning to them all these years, I can see I was dead wrong. They’re typefaces specifically designed <em>not</em> to stand out. As the designer Kris Sowersby writes in <a href="https://klim.co.nz/blog/untitled-sans-serif-design-information/">the design docs</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I made all Untitled Serif design decisions while reading. After each round of changes, I embedded the updated fonts into an ePub of Orwell’s 1984 and read several chapters. If a detail stood out, I removed it in the next round of changes. I kept doing this until it was totally comfortable to read.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I mention this because it’s interesting how your taste changes over time. In the past whenever I typeset something I had a bit of an ego. I wanted not only for the text to be beautiful but I wanted to wink and nod at designers: <em>ah yes, the historical context of this typeface compared with this other typeface is, indeed, quite illuminating.</em> I struggled taking off my monocle for one whole minute to see that Untitled Sans and Serif are for people more so than they are for designers to wink and nod at each other.</p>
<p>I still think there’s a time for winking and nodding and giving each other a pat on the back for being so brilliantly typographic, but it should be restrained. You don’t need to show off all the dang time about how well you know 18th century Turkish sans-serifs because your readers will never care.</p>
<p>So I can’t say that I’ve fully taken that monocle off—it remains perched on my face at all times—but there’s less of an ego with my work now.</p>
<p>(I think, I hope).</p>
<p>Either way, I have to remember the most important lesson of typography that I always tend to forget: typography is a service and not an art.</p>
The Risks of Staying Put2023-06-10T02:32:13Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-risks-of-staying-put/<p>Last month Mandy Brown wrote about <a href="https://everythingchanges.us/blog/the-devil-you-know/">how she struggled to quit her job</a> and this bit hit me like a sledgehammer: “I assumed that all the risk was in moving, that by definition staying put was the prudent option.” Same! For months I’ve been paralyzed with indecision about quitting my job. What happens if I have nothing else lined up afterwards? Shouldn’t I stay and wait until things get less stressful? Staying is the sensible thing to do, whilst quitting feels unreasonable or extreme.</p>
<p>“I could keep gathering information,” Mandy writes “...keep investigating the options, until a bright, clear, easy path opened before me. This is what I call the devil-you-know fallacy: the assumption that however bad your current circumstances are, they are at least familiar, and if you make a move, you could end up with a whole lot worse.”</p>
<p>I’m overwhelmed by this same fear: What if I’m being stubborn about all this work drama and what if it’s much worse elsewhere? Here’s the kicker from Mandy’s post though:</p>
<p>“...just because a situation is familiar doesn’t mean it’s the best you can do.”</p>
<p>That was the paralyzing thing for me, just like in the toxic romantic relationships I found myself stuck in years ago. It was the familiarity of that pain, stress, and sadness that I wanted to hold onto. There’s a certain kind of masochism when you stick around in a shitty job or a shitty relationship, there’s this belief that you don’t <em>deserve</em> any better than what you’ve got.</p>
<p>That is, until last week, when I finally did the thing and quit my job.</p>
<p>The job became so much bigger than just conflicts with folks: the stress became visible, tangible, until you could see it in my eyes. In a meeting last week someone asked if I was depressed and I was shocked that they had read through my brilliant act. I smiled, laughing it off as an un-caffeinated delirium but I knew they were right: I wasn’t sleeping, my appetite was boundless, I was breaking down in the middle of the day and I would spiral when I was out on a walk. Big droopy bags appeared beneath my eyes and my hair started to thin out whilst I gained 80 pounds over the past two years. I stopped talking to friends, I bailed on a bunch of people constantly. I kept getting sick—three times in a single month—and that was when I knew I’d hit the wall.</p>
<p>The pain outweighed the familiarity.</p>
<p>I stopped taking care of myself as the toxic, work-related daymares hijacked my attention whenever I was alone. Everywhere I went I was in a trance, forming arguments with people who only existed in Slack for me. The debates, the designs, the confrontation! Every time I closed my eyes I would start a stupid fight, until eventually a simple thing like an invite in my calendar became a tangible menace; a small needle, poking in the same sore spot as the last one.</p>
<p>I’m reminded of <em>A Pain That I’m Used To</em>, that absolute banger of a song by Depeche Mode all about a toxic relationship that hurts but it’s okay because the alternative—the unknown—feels so much worse.</p>
<p>On that note, Mandy writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I had spent months chewing on the various dangers and risks of each step I could take, and had not at all considered the dangers and risks of staying put.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I was thinking this way for months. But really there’s an «enormous» risk to staying put in an unhealthy relationship, whether that’s a professional or a sexy one. At some point I realized I was being turned into a thin mulch paste and that the risk to my health far outweighed whatever fear I had for the unknown out there. Each morning I felt weaker than the day before and I could feel my optimism fading. One day last week I woke up, looked in the mirror, and realized that I was an old man; a true, sour bastard.</p>
<p>So yeah, I’m scared right now. I fear living in one of the most expensive cities in the world without a job. I fear the economy buckling under my feet. I fear all the layoffs and the terrible jobs out there building a bunch of tech nothings.</p>
<p>But my god it’s better than the pain that I’m used to.</p>
<p>But but but but. There is this bigger fear, lurking under the surface. I fear that this is what my career will look like from here on out. I’ll get excited about something, work on it for three years until I end up confronting some unforgivable management decision, and then bail once I notice my health falling apart. A year later I’ll check in on the team and find that all my work was washed away with some reorg or some new team coming in. After a few more years I’ll look back and it was like I was never there at all.</p>
<p>I’m sort of a bad omen for the teams I work on. They get shitcanned or the team gets downsized or I get fired for being unreasonably reasonable. And I don’t want to work like that anymore. I want my life’s work to have some kind of meaning, some kind of longevity to it. I have no dreams of putting a dent in the universe but I do want to build something kind, something that I can point to in the future and, like a small boy, proudly shout: “That’s neat! And that’s me!”</p>
<p>Even if it’s a tiny thing.</p>
<p>After I gave my boss my two weeks’ notice, C and I went for a long walk around Lands End with a hodge podge of confusing feelings chasing behind me. But I knew I did the right thing. The sea air was toasted, the brief San Francisco summer returning for this lovely afternoon walk.</p>
<p>And I start to thinkin’: I have to remember that my health is more important than my job. And the pain that you’re used to is still a pain you should run away from.</p>
<p>A pain to be extracted. A pain to quit.</p>
The Linotype Book Project2023-06-09T17:05:57Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/linotype-book-project/<p>Back in 2012, Doug Wilson made one of those Defining Media Objects for me—a fantastic movie called <a href="https://watch.linotypefilm.com/">Linotype: The Film</a>. Watching it then in college, it certainly pushed me towards publishing and typography and learning about these beautiful old machines.</p>
<p>Now, ten years later, Doug is <a href="https://linotypebook.com/">writing the book</a> with his newsletter documenting the progress along the way and—go sign up! Support Doug! This is going to be a fantastic book, a fantastic project, and I’m thrilled to watch this Defining Media Object turn into another ten years later.</p>
To-do2023-06-04T16:33:58Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/to-do/<p>I’m not ready to write just yet; the sun is in the wrong place, the coffee is too hot, my sweater is too scratchy. I’ll take any excuse I can get to avoid sitting down and bang my head against a block of text that refuses to figure itself out.</p>
<p>That’s why I like what <a href="https://newsletter.shifthappens.site/subscribers/846bea4d-52db-4376-bc20-11c509ae6c4f/archive/a-to-do-list-of-to-do-lists">Marcin</a> has to say in his latest newsletter:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What helps facing an empty page is a reminder you’ve been there before and survived. What helps with writing and rewriting is the embarrassing notion that you can button mash yourself into greatness. You have no idea how often I kept moving things around and arrived at a perfect flow not through careful thinking, but by brute labour that resulted in a happy accident. Since it happened to me a few times, I now assume that this happens to other writers, too.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Marcin’s right. Brute force (and a good deadline) is the only way to make progress sometimes.</p>
Offsite2023-05-27T15:04:02Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/offsite/<p>A calendar invite will appear with a cryptic note: a strange location attached — somewhere in the middle of nowhere up north, across the bridge — and a dozen or so people on your team will be subscribed. It might be bowling, or a visit to a farm, or a fancy dinner. There will be emojis and long threads and emails announcing the time and place. Sure, you’ll go — you have to enjoy all this mandatory fun — and you hope it won’t be awkward as the last time. Yet since no one wants to be there, it always is.</p>
<p>You’ve found yourself trapped at a team offsite, and you can never escape.</p>
<p>This is how a lot of tech companies think about team building and I’ve always loathed these exercises, not because I hate fun and never want to set foot on a farm ever again, but because they reveal a certain kind of naivety about team-making and building morale.</p>
<p>I’ve always felt that great teams don’t need day trips to wine country or mini vacations. Instead, the best team building exercise is to give folks good, worthwhile work. Honest work. What kills great teams isn’t the lack of team offsites but the lack of focus, direction, resources, support, and financial recompense. A trip to the arcade or the bowling alley is incapable of fixing any of these problems. They are, at best, a distraction from mismanagement. Look at how well managed this team is! Look at all this fun!</p>
<p>But going to a cocktail bar is not enough to forgive the rambling, anxious meetings that go nowhere or the flip-flopping when it comes to decision making.</p>
<p>Offsites cannot make bad teams better because it’s always bad work that kills great teams.</p>
View Transitions API2023-05-20T15:33:50Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/view-transitions-api/<p>I can’t look at <a href="https://daverupert.com/2023/05/getting-started-view-transitions/">Dave’s tutorial about the View Transitions API</a> without my mind racing through all the possibilities here. How does this change web design in the future? Do websites even use frameworks if all you need for some app-like animations is a few lines of JavaScript and CSS?</p>
<p>Looks like Jake Archibald also has <a href="https://developer.chrome.com/docs/web-platform/view-transitions/">a great tutorial</a> that shows what’s going to be possible soon and Chris has collected <a href="https://chriscoyier.net/2023/05/18/early-days-examples-of-view-transitions/">a ton of recent examples</a> now that View Transitions has landed in a version of Chrome behind a flag.</p>
<p>Not to sound too romantic or anything but I can imagine that this could change the texture and feeling of websites in the future. That app-like-slickness is something that web folks have dreamed of for years (although I’ve always been cynical about and kinda pushed back against on my own projects — I want my websites to feel like websites).</p>
<p>Anyway, even this cynical jerk is excited about this thing.</p>
<p>(I wonder what kind of weirdo transition stuff I can make with the next essay...)</p>
Handwriting Fonts For Lo-Fi Design2023-05-19T15:24:25Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-best-handwriting-fonts-for-lo-fi-design/<p>Sometimes you don’t want to get distracted by flashy fonts and colors and what you really need is a great typeface that looks handwritten. But the other day I struggled finding something appropriate so, <a href="https://sfba.social/@fonts/110385024562097910">after asking around</a>, I’m noting the best ones here for future reference.</p>
<p>I’ll keep adding to this list, so <a href="mailto:robinjrendle@gmail.com">lemme know</a> if I’ve missed anything great here.</p>
<h2 id="shantell-sans" tabindex="-1">Shantell Sans <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-best-handwriting-fonts-for-lo-fi-design/#shantell-sans" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>→ <a href="https://shantellsans.com/">shantellsans.com</a></p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shantell-sans.webp" alt="The Shantell Sans type specimen" /></p>
<h2 id="maku" tabindex="-1">Maku <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-best-handwriting-fonts-for-lo-fi-design/#maku" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>→ <a href="https://motaitalic.com/product/maku/">motaitalic.com</a></p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/maku.webp" alt="The Maku typeface" /></p>
<h2 id="inkwell" tabindex="-1">Inkwell <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-best-handwriting-fonts-for-lo-fi-design/#inkwell" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>→ <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/overview">typography.com</a></p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/inkwell.webp" alt="Inkwell" /></p>
<h2 id="scribo" tabindex="-1">Scribo <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-best-handwriting-fonts-for-lo-fi-design/#scribo" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>→ <a href="https://www.underware.nl/fonts/scribo/">underware.nl</a></p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/scribo.webp" alt="The Scribo typeface" /></p>
<h2 id="adobe-handwriting" tabindex="-1">Adobe Handwriting <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-best-handwriting-fonts-for-lo-fi-design/#adobe-handwriting" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>→ <a href="https://fonts.adobe.com/fonts/adobe-handwriting">fonts.adobe.com</a></p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/adobe-handwriting.webp" alt="Adobe handwriting typeface" /></p>
<h2 id="liebeheide" tabindex="-1">LiebeHeide <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-best-handwriting-fonts-for-lo-fi-design/#liebeheide" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>→ <a href="https://liebefonts.com/fonts/liebeheide">liebefonts.com</a></p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/liebeheide.webp" alt="LiebeHeide typeface" /></p>
Layers2023-04-23T16:31:13Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/layers/<p>There’s a lot of similarities between writing music and building websites. And, in my teens, that’s what I thought I’d be doing with my career; spending my lifetime in a dark room, playing with sounds and tinkering with adding layers upon layers of complimentary vibrations. But all that experience layering tracks on top of each other in my bedroom weren’t wasted when the web eventually caught my attention, and I reckon that in fact this stuff helped me see the benefits of progressive enhancement faster.</p>
<p>Music making is like progressive enhancement in that you start with your drums (HTML), add the bass guitar (CSS), and then sprinkle screaming and synths and solos on top it all (Javascript). Animations aren’t the foundations of a website any more than the vocals are the foundations of a song. They’re important, sure, and they make the thing the thing. But a song can work without them.</p>
<p>This framing also helps me with design too. Words, colors, fonts; these are the foundations of a visual identity and so once you have those three things down then everything else can be built around it.</p>
<p>Layers!</p>
The Next Great Impasse2023-04-15T16:41:29Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-next-great-impasse/<p>One of the real fucked up things about being an adult is how all those feelings you had at sixteen—not knowing what you’re doing with your life etc.—never really leave you.</p>
<p>Those feelings might temporarily soften and quiet down but you’ll constantly bump into that not-knowing-ness over and over again. Even though when you overcome that big hurdle like a career change, you’ll veer off in some other direction with your life, believing that you’ve figured it all out now. Thank god, you reckon, you’re on track from here on out. No more big life decisions ever again! The path has been laid! The mold has been cast! Never again will you fear that life must be reset, redesigned from scratch.</p>
<p>But it only lasts a moment or two; the Next Great Impasse is always just as big and as terrifying as the last one.</p>
<p>The only solace you can get is knowing that you dealt with the Last Great Impasse. You hit that terrifying career change or broke off that fucked up relationship—your life veering off into another place and direction and velocity altogether—but you came out the other end okay.</p>
The details element is amazing2023-04-14T22:21:24Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-details-element-is-amazing/<p>Have you seen those fancy cards that pop open when ya click em and reveal more info? I think I saw em on Apple dot com not so long ago although now I can’t find a good example. Well, this morning I realized we don’t need a ton of JavaScript and CSS fanciness to get those big beautiful cards and here’s the proof: the ever-so-powerful and perfect <code><details></code> element can be used to make this effect.</p>
<p>Here, click this lil card to expand it:</p>
<p class="codepen" data-height="600" data-default-tab="result" data-slug-hash="RwerqaV" data-user="robinrendle" style="height: 300px; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; border: 2px solid; margin: 1em 0; padding: 1em;">
<span>See the Pen <a href="https://codepen.io/robinrendle/pen/RwerqaV">
Details Card</a> by Robin Rendle (<a href="https://codepen.io/robinrendle">@robinrendle</a>)
on <a href="https://codepen.io/">CodePen</a>.</span>
</p>
<script async="" src="https://cpwebassets.codepen.io/assets/embed/ei.js"></script>
<p>It’s not responsive or polished yet but isn’t this super neat? All of this is running off the magic of a few humble HTML tags:</p>
<pre class="language-html"><code class="language-html"><span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"><</span>details</span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span><br /> <span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"><</span>summary</span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span><br /> <span class="token comment"><!-- title --></span><br /> <span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"></</span>summary</span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span><br /> <span class="token comment"><!-- paragaphs --></span><br /><span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"></</span>details</span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span></code></pre>
<p>I’ll figure out why the animations aren’t working each time but besides that, I love this pattern and had no idea you could use <code><details></code> in this way.</p>
Syntax × Sentry2023-04-13T01:15:50Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/syntax-%C3%97-sentry/<p>Well, this sure is exciting: <a href="https://syntax.fm/">Syntax</a>, the web dev podcast by Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski, is joining the team at Sentry. Over on the Sentry blog, Cramer wrote about <a href="https://blog.sentry.io/2023/04/12/syntax-sentry-mmxxiii/">why this makes a bunch of sense</a> and how Syntax will grow in the future:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Many of us reminisce about the glory days of web forums and personal blogs that looked like your cool neighborhood dive bar instead of the bland, cookie-cutter chain restaurant that has inevitably emerged. For me, Syntax is a reminder of that beloved neighborhood institution with true character and is one that we want to continue building upon.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Usually when I hear these kinds of announcements my heart sinks, and I foresee giant banner ads and the whatever-the-product-is get worse over time. But when I heard about this one I knew it was right; sure, I’m biased since I work at Sentry but everyone here cares deeply about the web development community and making punk rock stuff. It’s gonna be a great fit.</p>
<p>It’s also worth listening to the <a href="https://syntax.fm/show/600/600th-episode-major-announcement-and-swag-giveaway">latest episode of the podcast</a> where Scott and Wes talk about why this is a big deal and how Syntax is only going to get better.</p>
Counter-space2023-04-11T19:25:24Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/counter-space/<p>As good as my eye might be after years of looking at letters, arranging white space is where I always fall short. And you can tell immediately when someone has fantastic white-space skills. It’s like watching a tea ceremony that’s been acted out every day for a thousand years; natural and intricate, careful in a careless way. But, for me, it’s still difficult all these years later.</p>
<p>Wait, what’s white space again?</p>
<p>So when you first set type in a book or a screen you’ll start to think about different kinds of “space”: letter-space, word-space, paragraph-space, heading-space. You’re thinking about which fonts work well together and how the text should be arranged and aligned. But it takes many years of doing this to learn that what you’re actually doing is arranging the white space between all these other spaces. There’s another dimension that you’ve never noticed and it was always there, bugging you.</p>
<p>See the margins either side of this text block? That’s what I think of as the white-space, the counter-space. See the sliver of a gap between the paragraph above and this one? That’s also the counter-space. And when this thing is cared for deeply then you can see it a million miles away. The margins feel just right. The headings and letters and everything just snaps together so neatly. In fact, if you select the absolute worst font in the world but you have great white space then it almost doesn’t matter.</p>
<p>Type designers talk about this all the time — the counter space between things — the black space of the letter and the white space of the bounding box it sits in. Take the letter <em>a</em> for example. You can draw the top part, the swooping belly, and the foot with a crayon and there you have it, that’s an <em>a</em>. But a type designer is likely to look at the letter in reverse or in outline; they’ll design all the space around the <em>a</em> instead of thinking of it as a series of lines and curves strung together. Imagine if the <em>a</em> was punched onto card and all you had was the leftover piece with a big hole in it. That’s what type designers often see.</p>
<p>It’s a strange way of viewing the world of letters. Instead of looking at the foot, they’ll look at the white space between the bowl. They’ll think and act and move in these counter spaces, just the same as punch cutters at the very beginning of this art saw their letters, too.</p>
<p>A close friend has great white-space skills and it’s infuriating. She’s not a type designer, but somehow has learned this secret that lies just outside my reach. Every bit of text she sets is always the <em>perfect</em> distance from every other thing, as if the text could be set no other way, as if it was all destined to fit together like this.</p>
<p><em>Ugh.</em></p>
<p>To take my skills to the next level I know I need to see the world in this other, unfamiliar way. I need to see the counter-space.</p>
The Mountain in the Sea2023-04-10T02:12:58Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-mountain-in-the-sea-/<p>We’re in Sonoma this weekend and I’m sat by the pool with one objective: finish Ray Nayler’s electric, goosebump-inducing novel <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-mountain-in-the-sea-ray-nayler/17839986?ean=9780374605957"><em>The Mountain in the Sea</em></a>. I’ve been sat in the sun for far too long but I can’t stop turning the page, can’t stop thinking about this frightening, potential future that Nayler has drawn here.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/the-mountain-in-the-sea.JPG" alt="" /></p>
<p>I bounced off this book a few times and it’s hard to say why. I think I struggle with a lot of sci-fi novels in their opening chapters because I feel lost at sea a bit: why are these people wearing masks that camouflage their appearance with neon-strobes? What happened to the USA? And why is everyone acting like everything’s okay when everything is clearly awful?</p>
<p>Anyway, after a few pages it all clicked and I fell completely in love with this thing. Nayler’s book is about language and aliens and being alone and terrifying factory ships that dominate the oceans with rail guns and rogue AIs buried deep in their hulls. It’s the rarest kind of novel; where the world feels complete and right from the start you’re panic-reading page after page in the hopes of getting a glimpse of your future.</p>
Time Control2023-04-01T15:17:49Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/time-control/<p>During the week I’m now slammed; meetings to meet, Slack threads to be unthreaded, and with endless emails inbetween that are nothing more than a distraction. Suddenly I find that my time has splintered into all these tiny incremental blocks of half-baked progress. In fact, it’s real hard for me to see progress in my work at all now simply because a full week of dedicated design work is smashed, splintered, scattered across months of distracted conversations and meetings.</p>
<p>This is not the way to do great work.</p>
<p>It’s annoying because this is a lesson I have to relearn every so often. I first discovered the secret to doing great work back in college; the deadline for all my projects was six weeks out and that gave me just seven days per project to slam it out and, once it was done, that was it, next. But with that week-long deadline hanging over my head I was more productive than I’ve ever been in my life. Each day I could see enormous progress because I’d cut out all the distractions of multiple projects looming in the background and I wasn’t context-switching every thirty minutes.</p>
<p>Instead, each morning, I’d wake up and spend 4 hours straight on one tiny detail. At lunch I’d go for a long, cold, brisk walk and when I returned to my desk I’d reevaluate the state of things: was this tiny detail worthy of that effort? Yes, more effort was required or no, move onto the next thing. Sure, the final result wasn’t even comparable to my classmates’ work—they had made beautiful visualizations and posters and books—but, compared to everything I’d made in the past, this kind of work was beyond belief.</p>
<p>At the end of those six weeks I had learned the secret to doing great things; <em>take control of your calendar</em>.</p>
<p>Time control, baby!</p>
<p>I learned that to do great work you need space. You need time. Away from people and notifications and messages, away from anything that can steal your attention. To do truly great work I needed those days of extended focus, weeks of dedicated chunks of time. I think that’s true of design, engineering, painting, blogging, you name it.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, that same kind of relationship with your work isn’t possible when you leave college and get a job. A company will try and steal your time in ten million tiny ways. That’s not to say those conversations and Slack threads are malicious, but if you don’t guard your time — design your days, so to speak — then they’ll curse you with only enough time to do half-baked work.</p>
<p>So here’s another reminder for myself here; you need to be precious with your time because you can’t make anything great in thirty minute increments. And no-one will do this work for you.</p>
1,7992023-03-27T15:13:46Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/1799/<p>There’s been years without building anything worthwhile, years without contribution, empty days and weeks without progress, with no great thing made, no lovely object at the end to show for it. There have been whole months without everything that makes something worthwhile, replaced instead by countless evenings and early mornings and skipped-lunches building garbage and half-baked websites designed to make some distant person very far away just a single fraction of a decimal point richer. I often feel that I’ve squandered my time here.</p>
<p>What the hell am I doing? Why this website, why this project, why this room? Why this effort here, when there’s so little time left?</p>
<p>A few days ago I was plodding up the treacherous hills around my neighborhood and I had a nasty thought: let’s say I write 60 blog posts a year, that’s maybe 1800 posts left in me if I’m lucky. Are those 1800 well spent? Am I making something worthwhile with all that focus and time and energy? At the end of those mere 1800, will I look back and smile? Will I want to brag about it all?</p>
<p>I know. I’m being horrendously morbid and I’ve probably just listened to The Horrors too much this week. But still.</p>
<p>There’s a feeling that’s real hard to describe — the words fail to render here — but there’s this great feeling of being in the right room at the right time. The <em>only</em> room at the <em>only</em> time. This feeling where fate was always going to lead you to this very spot, the one you stand in right now, and that’s where you ought to be.</p>
<p>College felt like that, where a tiny bomb shelter of a building in Reading stuffed to the brim with a bunch of font nerds was the most important place in the universe to me. And if you listened carefully you could hear the tiny creak of progress being made; beautiful work being churned like butter. Every day felt like I was struggling like hell to keep up, sure, but it also felt like the struggle was damn well worth it. If only I could learn a few tricks, if only I could learn how two colors can snap together like <em>this</em>, then I might just command graphics like a grand wizard.</p>
<p>My brother’s wedding felt like that, too; a Romanian wedding is a song, and I found myself in a trance, overwhelmed with how beautiful and joyous it was. It was the perfect room, the perfect time. Great work was being done in the singing and I was just there for the ride.</p>
<p>How many rooms do I walk into now and feel that familiar clunk of progress? How often do I sit at my keyboard and use each letter to the best of my ability? How often am I working on the right thing, a thing I can be proud of, a thing I want to brag about endlessly?</p>
<p>That’s what’s so hard about being on the internet, as everywhere else looks so very important: you can hear the rattling of great work being done without you. There are studios and bedrooms and hallways and meeting rooms in Delhi and Hong Kong and Denver where <em>it</em> is happening, the Great Work is taking place, and you’re not a part of it, you’re not contributing to the progress, and you’re not where you really need to be.</p>
Your reading should be messy2023-03-25T16:47:51Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/your-reading-should-be-messy/<p>My family had a room that we called the Library, but even back then I knew it was really just our dining room with a few bookshelves around a small table. When I was a kid I would look up at this tower of books though and wonder at all those people and ideas and stories, it was simply overwhelming. I was told that all these books are precious things — they must never be folded, bent, or broken. Any smudges or notes on a book is heresy and our reading should always be a clean activity since it’s what separates us from the beasts.</p>
<p>Preservation of all sacred texts — from expensive fine print books, all the way down to pulp-paperback novels — was the most important thing in the world.</p>
<p>Years later, when I began reading everything I could in my early teens, I snuck into the Library one day and discovered, to my horror, that all the books were in pristine condition. It was row after row, shelf after shelf. Something clicked and I knew I had found a horrible secret about my family: they had bought these books to be displayed like jewelry, rather than to be read.</p>
<p>In that moment I knew that all those dumb rules around reading and books was dead wrong and that there was nothing sadder in this world than an unused book — clean, without notes or scribbles, without coffee or fingerprints, without any trace of the reader at all.</p>
<p>Now here’s the secret: good reading is messy reading.</p>
<p>If I want the kind of novel that gets deep into my bones, the sort of non-fiction mystery that stays with me years after the fact, then I must bring the sticky notes and pens and pencils and let my books get scuffed and scraped along the way. I should always walk away from a book with visible progress of my reading and if there’s no scribbles in the margins then the reading simply wasn’t good enough — a new book must be immediately prepared.</p>
<p>After years of treating my books as if they ought to be preserved in a museum, I now believe that you should honor the books by breaking them. Read them all so messily! Fold them, bend them, tear them! Throw them into your backpack or leave them open in Jenga-like towers by the side of your bed. Don’t fret about stains or torn edges or covers left dangling off the spine after years of reading.</p>
<p>That is what a book is. That is what a book is for.</p>
The venture capitalist’s dilemma2023-03-20T15:12:54Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-venture-capitalist%E2%80%99s-dilemma/<p><a href="https://open.substack.com/pub/mollywhite/p/the-venture-capitalists-dilemma">Molly White</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Recent weeks have drawn a bold underline beneath what has been clear to many for a long time: that those controlling massive amounts of capital and power in our society are not the smartest, or most level-headed, or most altruistic among us. Venture capital may be the best way to serve the interests of capital, but we need to consider alternative models that prioritize the interests of people.</p>
</blockquote>
Artificial Guessing2023-03-16T22:42:50Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/artificial-guessing/<p>A few more notes about (<em>ugh</em>) AI. I promise I’ll stop at some point but this is basically therapy now and since you aren’t legally obligated to read any further, this is technically your fault.</p>
<p>I have two conflicting feelings about AI, the text generating kind.</p>
<p>First, I see AI as a mirror. Bounce ideas back and forth, edit and cajole the output into non-hallucinatory garbage, all this stuff is kinda magic. AI echoing your own work back to you opens up so many possibilities — you might not have Paul McCartney sat next to you feeding you song ideas and riffing alongside you but instead a drunk computer randomly proclaiming it loves you. Either way, it’s going to be amazing to riff, to play, to experiment.</p>
<p>Second, I see AI as a prison. Slamming AI into products like everyone’s doing right now is mostly an excuse not to think critically about hard problems. Instead of brainstorming, discussing, iterating, closely inspecting a product to understand it and figure out what to show on a page, well, we can just let the machines figure it out for us! This big <a href="https://adactio.com/journal/19994">guessing machine</a> can do our homework and we can all pack up and go to the beach.</p>
<p>In this way, AI is a prison because it traps us, it tricks us. It’s far too easy to forget that what’s happening under the hood is a bunch of similar words being slapped into each other over and over again and then hoping for the best. It’s a charade of intelligence that we mistake for actual intelligence. But alas, Artificial Intelligence sounds much more impressive than Artificial Guessing in a slide deck.</p>
<p>So I get why folks are excited about AI and machine learning and everything else. But I believe that they’re wrong about <em>how</em> and <em>why</em> AI is exciting. It’s not an excuse to turn your brain off, and AI most certainly isn’t the bicycle for the mind that folks believe it to be.</p>
<p>But it can be both of these things at the same time! It can be awful and annoying and impressive!</p>
Tech-last2023-03-09T23:13:34Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/tech-last/<p>Making good decisions in a large organization is always impossible. But it’s especially hard when a new technology sweeps through the culture and consumes everyone’s attention. Once a year, every year, a new thing will appear on the market and be on the tip of everyone’s tongue. You won’t be able to escape discussions about it until one day it looks like you’re behind the game simply because you’re ignoring it.</p>
<p>[ Insert every conversation about front-end frameworks ]</p>
<p>Here’s one example: many years ago I couldn’t get folks on a team to stop talking about emoji. At every turn folks would see the popularity of emoji bloom around them and then they would try and slam it into the website we worked on together. Emoji all the things! The team was obsessed with the emoji they were seeing in emails and websites and apps that they couldn’t imagine a world without them. They believed that our humble website looked out of touch without emoji, where I loudly, aggressively argued that by chasing trends we would never be the ones to set them.</p>
<p>A few months later, the obsession was gone. Overnight we stopped talking about emoji and now every other conversation was focused on some half-baked project about chatbots. Then it was crypto of course, then a few years later it was NFT junk that disappeared just as quickly as it came, and now, today, again with the chatbots. Although they’ve improved quite a bit, I still believe that once the initial excitement wears off it’s easy to see how these tools spit out mostly useless and irrelevant chunks of words that you can’t ever trust.</p>
<p>It’s cool tech, sure. But it ain’t a product.</p>
<p>This might sound like I’m just trying to be contrarian, and for many years I worried about that. I worried that I was just bullish on progress and I simply didn’t like following all these technologies because they were popular. It was high school all over again, where I hated The Beatles because everyone was listening to them all the time.</p>
<p><em>Show me the boring technologies, the boring things!</em> I thought. <em>Yes, those are the ideas that will last</em>.</p>
<p>After thinking about it for a good long while though, I realize that I’m not against a technology if it contributes to something useful or something grand. Tinkering with anything is always great and letting your curiosity run wild is a-okay with me. What’s really concerning is when everyone is consumed with the technology-first and the problem-last.</p>
<p>I feel like with AI right now there is something <em>there</em> there, sure, but folks are just trying to slam it into everything regardless of whether or not that makes the product better. They don’t start with the idea first and then explore multiple options that leads to this one technology— machine learning or whatever—which just happens to be the right thing to solve it. No! They start with the technology-first and then work backwards to a product. They’re so consumed with the flash of newness and seeing the future (<em>yawn!</em>) that they become star-struck wanting to be at the front and center of this big, world-changing conversation. Their obsession is a failure of discipline and because of that they fail to see what they’re building.</p>
<p>It’s why using an enormous front-end framework to build a blog is a bad idea (many moons ago I worked on a tiny website for a big tech co and I was aghast at the colossal, bloated complexity of their build tools to make a single tiny webpage). Tech-first is why crypto and NFTs was always a bad idea. Tech-first is why collecting vast amounts of data without a clear purpose was, and always will be, a terribly silly idea.</p>
<p>I’m certain now that if you want to build something great you have to see through the tech. And that’s really hard to do when this cool new thing is all that anyone is talking about. But that’s why this one specific thing is the hallmark of a great organization; they aren’t distracted by short-lived trends and instead focus on the problem-first. Relentlessly, through the noise.</p>
<p>So, a reminder for myself here if I ever get swept up in the latest trend: if you want to build anything substantial, if you truly want to build a great product, then the technology has to come last.</p>
An end to typographic widows on the web2023-03-07T16:41:22Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/an-end-to-typographic-widows-on-the-web/<p>Here’s a handy new thing coming to a CSS near you:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">text-wrap</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> balance<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>Richard Rutter <a href="https://clagnut.com/blog/2424/">has the scoop</a> and explains how this bit of CSS will help ensure that titles and large headings don’t break weirdly and leave a word on a line all by itself.</p>
<p>It doesn’t help in all cases though, as Richard notes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Balancing left-aligned headings is not always preferable. I would love to have a value for text-wrap whose sole purpose is to prevent widows, without any other formatting involved.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Same! Although there’s a bunch of reasons why this doesn’t exist in CSS today, I’ll still take this one small improvement as a temporary stop gap before we can get to properly justified text on the web.</p>
I don’t want to log in to your website2023-03-05T16:50:05Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/i-dont-want-to-log-in-to-your-website/<p>Elizabeth Lopatto wrote this great piece about <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/28/23618804/google-facebook-login-ads-web-design-hell">how junk web design practices are ruining the web</a>; the login forms, the popups, the chatbots, the everything! Our standards are so very low when it comes to web design and Elizabeth points at it all and says <em>why</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One of the major problems with salesbros is that they think “always be closing” is a mantra to live by because they didn’t understand the point of Glengarry Glen Ross, which is that salespeople are nightmares. That’s why there’s always some silly pop-up chat at the bottom of every website now. No, Pamela — if that is your real name — I don’t want live assistance booking my yoga class. You are hogging valuable screen real estate.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The problem is that it’s real hard to argue against shitty design and product decisions. If <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/vibe-driven-development/">junk data</a> rules your organization then it’s almost useless fighting; when you see your customers as links in a spreadsheet or tiny dots in a graph then every terrible design decision under the sun can be justified. Heck, in most cases junk design isn’t permitted but <em>preferred</em>.</p>
<p>(If the numbers are the most important thing, then your website will suffer the consequences.)</p>
<p>Anyway, Elizabeth continues and reminds us that, away from the web, we can live a life without ads, without constant junk and distractions. In real life, “they” cannot have everything from us:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...there are no real public spaces on the internet. Here in reality, I can fuck off to a park and hug a tree and sit on a bench and do stuff without ads, without anyone trying to track me, and without having to pay a dime. There was a time within my memory when people tried to make websites feel like semipublic places — you could hang out on someone’s cool blog and enjoy yourself. Sure, there might be a banner ad, but that’s like paying a buck for coffee and then just sitting in a diner all day with free refills.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>To be honest, I don’t know if I share this same optimism as scammers and con artists have always been a part of the web and always will be. Plus I don’t think it’s healthy to look back and claim that there was a golden age of the internet because it’ll encourage us to think of the open web as over and absolutely eff that.</p>
<p>(If you want to see a better web, you have to make it.)</p>
<p>Anyway, I still agree with almost everything in this piece and one of my favorite things about making a website is not including any of this junk that Elizabeth describes. No upsells, no whatevers. I like it when a website just…ends. I like it when I get an email about the thing I signed up for. I like it when the unsubscribe link works. I like it when a product stops existing after I stop using it and doesn’t try to consume my life with garbage.</p>
<p>The products I adore the most are the ones I want to return to because they respect me as a person, and clearly don’t see me as a point in the data.</p>
<p>That’s how I see this website, too. Over the years I hope this approach has let folks trust me a bit, knowing that I’ll never pilfer their information and I hope this has garnered my website with a small reputation; I’ll always respect your time and attention as the precious things they are.</p>
<p><em>[blogs about elden ring again]</em></p>
Investing in RSS2023-03-01T03:59:21Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/investing-in-rss/<p><a href="https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2023-02-23-investing-in-rss/">Tim Kadlec</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The act of spending that time in those feeds still feels like a very deliberate, intentional act. Curating a set of feeds I find interesting and making the time to read them feels like an investment in myself.</p>
</blockquote>
The Brink2023-02-24T15:44:38Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-brink/<p>When I’m uncertain about my career or my personal life, books have always shown me the way. A dazzling novel about bread or a non-fiction tome all about nuclear physics will never fail to soothe me, even when it feels like my career has gone sideways or my love life has exploded into a million irreparable pieces.</p>
<p>It doesn’t matter how bad I feel. Every time a great book will slap me awake, lock things down, recalculate all my emotions, show me everything I’ve missed. My nerves will calm, my diet will slowly improve, and the screaming vortex of anxious ghouls living inside my head will back off for a moment or two.</p>
<p>I always forget this so here’s a reminder for the future: books are always the answer when things suck.</p>
<p>Sad? Go read a book. Alone? Read a book. Feeling dumb? Depressed? Career-stalled? Home-sick? Love-struck? Books, books, books. Try a novel, or a children’s book, or a saucy book about horny elves, or a Serious Document about Serious Things. Try a .pdf! Read a few pages and if it doesn’t work, throw it away. Pick up the next book, try that. Keep going until you can hear the words in the book over the howling vortex of anxious ghouls.</p>
<p>Discard books at your pleasure and with ease, lay waste to whole authors and styles and genres of writing if it doesn’t suit you right this very moment. Be polyamorous with your reading and hurl books into the ocean if they have a single annoying sentence in them as there’s not enough time to fight through a book that isn’t immediately comfortable and warm and light. Be Caligula in your reading; sip books briefly, quickly, and then let whole vineyards spoil if that’s your fancy.</p>
<p>Read for joy and joy alone. That’s always the answer.</p>
The Writing of the Gods2023-02-20T18:43:55Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-writing-of-the-gods/<p>Here’s Edward Dolnick in his lovely book <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-writing-of-the-gods-the-race-to-decode-the-rosetta-stone-edward-dolnick/16544545"><em>The Writing of the Gods</em></a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The crucial point is that though speaking comes naturally, writing had to be invented. Speech is part of our biological heritage, like crawling and walking. Writing is a product of human ingenuity, like the telephone or the airplane.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Thinking of a language as a technology or a product is strange at first but the more you look at them the more they resemble microwaves or dishwashers; incredibly complicated under the hood but also sort of boring on the surface. I don’t think the same can be said for hieroglyphs though, as they’ve managed to capture the imagination for thousands of years. Forgotten and unreadable for more than a millennia, Dolnick’s book captures the strangeness of hieroglyphs and how they don’t function like English or Italian or Spanish:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The word <em>snake</em> consists of five signs, and <em>three</em> of them are snakes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Before reading Dolnick’s book, I had no idea that in order to read hieroglyphs you needed to know this vast library of puns and visual cues; sometimes a glyph could stand for a sound, sometimes for words unrelated to the picture, and sometimes they stand for the act they’re portraying, like walking.</p>
<p>The story that led to breaking the code of the hieroglyphs is fascinating, and <em>The Writing of the Gods</em> details the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, the plunder of a country, and Napoleon’s bonkers failed expedition into the desert. But although each story that makes up this book is fabulous, I can’t stop thinking about Dolnick’s argument that the alphabet is a technology:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Though writing was invented independently several times—in China, the Middle East, and the New World—scholars believe that the alphabet was invented only once and then spread across the globe.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The alphabet sounds so rudimentary—how can it be a technology?—but it wasn’t until a few hundred years ago that there was an established <em>order</em> given to the alphabet in English (a, b, c, etc.). What makes this even more interesting is that letters weren’t invented by any single person but evolved like an organism over thousands of years.</p>
<p>And Egyptian hieroglyphs were at the very beginning of this alphabetic breakthrough.</p>
Vibe Driven Development2023-02-19T17:57:18Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/vibe-driven-development/<p>Building a great product is a matter of two questions: How should we measure progress? And what should we build next?</p>
<p>That first question is the most important because how you collect data and what you count as success influences everything else; if your organization is measuring shit then they’ll build nothing but shit. And most product orgs suck and churn out garbage projects because they waste so much time thinking in terms of junk data and half baked user inputs to inform their decisions.</p>
<p>(Show me what your org measures and I’ll show ya the crappy product that comes out the other side.)</p>
<p>The problem underlying all this is that when it comes to building a product, all data is garbage, a lie, or measuring the wrong thing. Folks will be obsessed with clicks and charts and NPS scores—the NFTs of product management—and in this sea of noise they believe they can see the product clearly. There are courses and books and talks all about measuring happiness and growth—surveys! surveys! surveys!—with everyone in the field believing that they’ve built a science when they’ve really built a cult.</p>
<p>(No great product has ever been made because of the answers collected in a dumb user survey.)</p>
<p>So how do you measure progress then?</p>
<p>I guess customers could tell us the answer, right? Well, no. Sure, you can talk to customers to see <em>how</em> they struggle but they cannot tell you <em>why</em> they struggle. They’ll have terrible ideas for improvements like “I really wish AI could show me all the relevant things on this page” or “I want more dashboards” where the answer is always much simpler than that. Customer feedback is a geiger counter: they can tell you about the problem coming your way but not how to prevent it.</p>
<p>(Customers, like data, will always mislead us on what to build next.)</p>
<p>See, I don’t think you can build a great product for customers. Yes, yes, yes; you can make billions of dollars building something for customers and go live on a beach in the south of France. But you’ll have built junk in the process; the product will suffer if you build it for customers. You’ll spend every waking moment trying to measure user happiness and score feelings in a spreadsheet and not improving the product.</p>
<p>In every product org it feels as if folks mistake qualitative data—stuff that can’t be measured like feelings—with quantitative data—stuff that can be measured like numbers or time or temperature. They’ll say “this user is 4.5% happy” and, okay, great. Now what? This numerical value sure is bullshit but it’s not even helpful bullshit because these numbers never explain why things suck.</p>
<p>(Just look at the product and it will tell you why it sucks.)</p>
<p>It comes down to this annoying, upsetting, stupid fact: the only way to build a great product is to use it every day, to stare at it, to hold it in your hands to feel its lumps. The data and customers will lie to you but the product never will. And most product orgs suck because they simply don’t use the products that they’re building; they ship incremental nothings without direction because they’re looking at spreadsheets all day long filled with junk data nothings.</p>
<p>See, I don’t know much about product stuff. I have no experience as a product manager, no experience running teams or building a company. Take everything I say here with an enormous silo of salt. But: I don’t care what the data shows me and I’m not sure I ever will. You can show me charts and spreadsheets all day long and I will not care. Tell me what your gut says instead after relentless experience of the product every day. This is the only way to see the world clearly.</p>
<p>Perhaps arbitrary, perhaps a bit naive, but the answer is <a href="https://weeknotes.buttondown.email/archive/trading-time-for-visibility/">vibe-driven development</a>. If you have good experience of the product, your vibes will lead you down the right path of what to build next. I think this is why small orgs make better things faster than large orgs; they’re all about the vibes. Large orgs are bloated and frozen in place because they spend all their time talking about bullshit numbers instead of looking at the product. Whilst smaller orgs typically aren’t run by the numbers, they’re so focused on the product because they have to.</p>
<p>So when we use data to drive development it always leads us down the wrong path, it forces us to look in all the wrong places for the answers. Customers can tell you what sucks, sure. Dashboards and spreadsheets can show you attrition or whatever, yes. But these inputs can’t build a vision of your product for you. They’re mostly distractions and any moment with your eye off the product is a moment lost to making it better.</p>
<p>You can only build a great product if you care more for the vibes than for the data.</p>
Notes from a decade in publishing2023-02-16T15:35:06Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/read-books,-write-books.-that%E2%80%99s-the-deal./<p><a href="https://austinkleon.com/2018/05/22/3-thoughts-on-a-decade-of-publishing-books/">Austin Kleon</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In my work, <a href="https://austinkleon.com/2015/11/12/problems-of-output-are-problems-of-input/">problems of output are problems of input</a>. If my work sucks, it’s usually because I’m not being a good enough fan. I need to read, and read voraciously, searching for that thing that’s going to get me back on track. Read books, write books, repeat. That’s the deal.</p>
<p>I remember sitting in the audience during readings and wanting so badly to be the person on stage. Now I find myself relishing any chance I get to be a fan again. I love pointing to people’s work and sharing the stuff that I love. I love linking to great books in my newsletter. I love sending my agent links to good writers looking for an agent. One of my far-out dreams is to have my own little publishing imprint.</p>
</blockquote>
The Curse of Academy Engraved LET2023-02-15T16:01:20Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-curse-of-academy-engraved-let/<p>I couldn’t agree more with Chris here when he asks if it’s really necessary to show <a href="https://chriscoyier.net/2023/02/13/id-like-to-remove-the-typeface-academy-engraved-let-please/">hundreds of junk fonts in macOS Ventura</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>That’s 567!!!! Fonts!!!! Automatically installed that you cannot remove or deactivate on macOS Ventura. What in the absolute heck.</p>
<p>And for the record my preferred font management tool Typeface can’t deactivate it either. So it seems like there isn’t an easy third-party way to skirt the restrictions in FontBook.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That gets real annoyin’ when you’re doing anything with fonts but it’s especially annoying in tools like Figma, where I basically live now. Each time ya wanna select a font you’re greeted with hundreds of system fonts that you can’t hide or dismiss and so you have to endlessly hunt for the few good ones or the custom fonts you’ve bought and installed. It’s a real confusing mess.</p>
<p>So: dear Tim, please let us remove these fonts from macOS Ventura.</p>
CSS Nesting2023-02-10T04:08:04Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/css-nesting/<p>We used to write CSS like this:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">a</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">color</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> blue<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><br /><span class="token selector">a:hover</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">color</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> lightblue<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>This kinda sucked for a lot of reasons. First, it means that our code is split up and disassociated from itself a bit. Second, because it gets harder to read larger chunks of code. So languages like Sass and Less came out which allowed us to nest blocks of CSS together like this:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">a</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">color</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> blue<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><br /> <span class="token selector">&:hover</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">color</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> lightblue<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>And it was beautiful. But, alas, for years this was only possible in those extension languages which at some point felt a bit silly. Writing CSS the old way, without nesting, felt wrong.</p>
<p>So I almost fell out of my seat yesterday when I caught wind of the announcement that <a href="https://webkit.org/blog/13813/try-css-nesting-today-in-safari-technology-preview/">CSS nesting has landed</a> in actual browsers and if you want to play around with them then you can do that in the latest version of <a href="https://webkit.org/downloads/">Safari Technology Preview</a>. This means it’s half a step away from landing in real browsers very soon.</p>
<p>This is so exciting! From that announcement blog post, they write about it all in a lot more detail and it gets even more exciting:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You can mix Nesting with Container Queries, Feature Queries, Media Queries, and/or Cascade Layers however you want. Anything can go inside of anything.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is no half-assed implementation! This thing can do media queries! Hallelujah! When I’ve worked on my essays that’s the one thing I’ve craved from CSS after container queries—the ability to nest like this:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">.card</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token atrule"><span class="token rule">@media</span> screen <span class="token keyword">and</span> <span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token property">min-width</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 500px<span class="token punctuation">)</span></span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /> <span class="token atrule"><span class="token rule">@media</span> screen <span class="token keyword">and</span> <span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token property">min-width</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 750px<span class="token punctuation">)</span></span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /> <span class="token atrule"><span class="token rule">@media</span> screen <span class="token keyword">and</span> <span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token property">min-width</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 900px<span class="token punctuation">)</span></span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /> <span class="token atrule"><span class="token rule">@media</span> screen <span class="token keyword">and</span> <span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token property">min-width</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 1200px<span class="token punctuation">)</span></span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>(That’s what you’d write in Sass but from what I can tell here it looks like you’ll have to use the <code>&</code> to get each media query working right.)</p>
<p>Anyway, Chrome <a href="https://caniuse.com/css-nesting">has implemented the same syntax</a> here too so it’s not like this is a one-off browser hack for the Safari cool kids; CSS Nesting is an actual standard and agreement across browsers here. That’s amazing!</p>
<p>So thanks to everyone who worked on this; the browser folks and the standards folks and the folks writing tutorials and complaining in blog posts. Because, in a few short months, I expect we’ll all have forgotten that nesting was once impossible.</p>
<p>And that’s the perfect kind of upgrade to a language you can make.</p>
“These Don’t Shuffle”2023-02-09T16:37:24Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/these-don%E2%80%99t-shuffle/<p><a href="https://lucybellwood.com/">Lucy</a> and I chatted the other day about prototypes, the projects we’re workin’ on, and how to blog on the world wide web. My favorite bit is when Lucy shows the prototype she made for <em>Seacritters!</em>, her upcoming graphic novel about capybara pirates.</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/bcG_3Ev6KV0" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
The best time to own a domain2023-02-06T16:07:17Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-best-time-to-own-a-domain/<p><a href="https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/best-time-to-own-a-domain/">Jim Nielsen</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>That is why owning a domain (and publishing your content there) is like planting a tree: it’s value that starts small and grows. The best time to own a domain and publish your content there was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.</p>
</blockquote>
Shift Happens Livestream2023-02-01T16:56:12Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/shift-happens-livestream-/<p>Mark your calendars: next week on Tuesday Feb 7th, I’ll be chatting with <a href="https://aresluna.org/">Marcin Wichary</a> in a livestream about his book, <a href="https://shifthappens.site/"><em>Shift Happens</em></a>, which beautifully details the history of keyboards from punch cards and typewriters to the rectangles in our pockets. Earlier that morning Marcin’s Kickstarter for the book opens up and then shortly after we’re going to celebrate in the livestream.</p>
<p>There’s so much to talk about! There’s the painstaking research Marcin has poured into this book investigating keyboards, plus there’s a million questions I want to ask him about the design process, the photographs, the typesetting, the people that make up the stories in his book and, of course, what Marcin’s favorite keyboards are.</p>
<p>We’re going to run the livestream over on YouTube and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktIuUa0uf7E">you can subscribe here</a> to get pinged when we’re live. It all starts at 11am PST, 2pm EST, or 7pm GMT. See you there!</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ktIuUa0uf7E" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
Notes On Hypertext2023-01-30T16:20:06Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/notes-on-hypertext/<p>Okay, here’s a great chat with <a href="https://nadia.xyz/">Nadia Asparouhova</a> and Kicks Condor about <a href="https://www.kickscondor.com/nadia-eghbal/">writing mighty fine hypertext</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Someone (I think Eugene Wei?) once tweeted that all Twitter accounts eventually sound like fortune cookies. I don’t want to become a fortune cookie. So I like things like newsletters, and my notes page, which are still discoverable and semi-public, but aren’t subject to short feedback loops. I also removed comments on my blog for the same reason, and I never look at my site analytics.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She puts it better here than I ever could: beware short feedback loops on the internet! They are dangerous! As creators of fine hypertext products we need to look for the <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/the-right-kind-of-attention/">right kind of attention</a>.</p>
<hr />
<p>Nadia also chats about likes and how introducing them changes yer hypertext in curious ways:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The problem with likes is it naturally draws your eye towards the most-liked stuff, instead of deciding for yourself what’s most interesting. It almost feels like I’d be taking agency away from the reader by doing that.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I think that’s one quality of a good old blog; <em>reader agency</em>. I remember late nights roaming through my favorite blogs and I’d find something, a small trinket of the tiniest little poem, from way back in 2002. And because there were no likes or comments or anything attached to the post, <em>I</em> decided it was important.</p>
<hr />
<p><a href="https://lucybellwood.com/">Lucy</a> and I talked about this last night — about the kind of attention you get from a newsletter vs. a blog and how a newsletter feels like a much more public space. Whereas a blog is all subterfuge and hidden under the mossy growth of a URL, a newsletter will kick in the front door, wave in the .44, etc.</p>
<p>So naturally you write differently depending on the platform because the public-ness changes how “seen” you feel. I guess the question we have to ask ourselves is do we fight that or should we bend to the platform?</p>
<hr />
<p>Nadia links off to Venkatesh Rao’s <em><a href="https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/03/01/where-the-wild-thoughts-are/">Where the Wild Thoughts Are</a></em> and, in that post, Rao talks about the future of monetizing their blog:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The blog is not about supporting the business and keeping it profitable. The business is about supporting the blog and keeping it free.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Hell yes! I hope that in the future—if money ever comes my way because of my writing—then I have Rao’s courage to say no to it like this.</p>
<hr />
<p>This conversation about money reminds me of another chat with Lucy—<a href="https://lucybellwood.com/websites-wobsites-wibsits/">this one</a>—where we talked about homepages.</p>
<p>There’s an intro that I’ve come to loathe which welcomes you on every personal website: “hi! I’m xyz and I’m a blah in blah blah blah...” All personal websites have this same style and it’s why on my website I’ve tried to push away from that as hard as possible. Also, I kinda like that people have to hunt a little bit to figure out who I am.</p>
<p>So I was ranting to Lucy about that and she said, hey, some folks don’t have that same privilege of having a mysterious website. They have to make it easy for people to give them attention and figure out who they are because their livelihood depends on it.</p>
<p>This changed my perspective because, sure, it’s easy to say that when you don’t need money from your blog, when you have a stable day job. But when your website <em>is</em> your day job then everything about that relationship with your reader changes. And that’s not always a bad thing.</p>
<hr />
<p>One last random thought from that post by Rao: he talks about websites as the wilderness. Which, of course, <em>yes</em> but also — what? He describes his relationship with his blog <a href="https://www.ribbonfarm.com/">Ribbonfarm</a> is not like a product he’s designed, but something else altogether:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Nature includes human beings and the things humans create, which means Muir’s idea that “none of Nature’s landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild” applies to human-created wildnernesses as well.</p>
<p>Ribbonfarm, I like to think in my more romantic moments, is one such human-created wilderness. If you ever find that it is getting less wild (wild as in woods, not as in “crazy”), warn me.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I adore this but it’s also something I fear deep-down. I want my website to feel like the world in <em>Bloodborne</em> or <em>Sekiro</em>, where you’re thrown into this fully-fledged universe and have no idea what the hell is going on and you have to read the description of a boot in your inventory to see the world clearly. I fear losing that feeling, or letting my website become paved-over or civilized or any less wild than it once used to be.</p>
<p>I want my website to permanently feel like the wilderness.</p>
Container Queries and Typography2023-01-26T16:13:23Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/container-queries-and-typography/<p>Back in 2013 when I started my career there were a few big problems with CSS:</p>
<ol>
<li>We had to rely on Sass to get variables which made everything a lot more complicated than necessary (build environments and the like).</li>
<li>We had to rely on a complex series of <code>display:float</code>s and there were endless books and tools and blog posts dedicated to making these complex hacks understandable.</li>
<li>We only (just!) had media queries and so we could adapt our layouts to the size of the browser window, but we couldn’t adapt components to the container you put them in which is likely what you want to do at least 50% of the time.</li>
</ol>
<p>Sure, there were all sorts of other irritants like browser inconsistencies and what not but these were the major problems that led to daily annoyances and grumbling with CSS. They slowed us down and added unnecessary time and complexity to our work.</p>
<p>But now, in 2023, look:</p>
<ol>
<li>We have <a href="https://css-tricks.com/a-complete-guide-to-custom-properties/">custom properties</a>! I’ve written plain CSS for years now and am extremely happy without adding yet another thing to my build process just to get variables in Sass.</li>
<li><a href="https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/complete-guide-grid/">CSS Grid</a> exists! And then, even better, <a href="https://ishadeed.com/article/learn-css-subgrid/">subgrid</a> is well supported in browsers!</li>
<li>And last but not least, container queries!</li>
</ol>
<p>This is why I get particularly annoyed when folks shit-talk CSS. Just look how much it’s grown! The infinite cosmic power of CSS in 2023!</p>
<p>That last item though—<em>container queries</em>—has finally been checked off my CSS bucket list which is wild to me because just a few years ago folks spoke of them as if they were alchemy or self-driving cars; an impossible future that we should just give up dreaming about. But now? Here they are, available in <a href="https://caniuse.com/?search=container%20queries">every major browser</a>.</p>
<p>So I’ve been thinking about this bucket list and what kind of impact container queries will have on me as a designer and developer since each big change in CSS requires us to adapt how we work, how we think about websites.</p>
<p>What do container queries make possible then?</p>
<p>To answer that question we have to start at the beginning. Back in 2013 us web designers could only detect the width of the browser window. This was especially problematic when it comes to typography; let’s say you have a heading like this...</p>
<pre class="language-html"><code class="language-html"><span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"><</span>h2</span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span>This is a heading<span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"></</span>h2</span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span></code></pre>
<p>...most of the time you want this heading to have a font-size of <code>22px</code> and a line-height of <code>23px</code>. The good developer thing to do is start with your smaller-screen styles first and then build up to your desktop styles like this:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">h2</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-size</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 18px<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">line-height</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 20px<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><br /><span class="token atrule"><span class="token rule">@media</span> screen <span class="token keyword">and</span> <span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token property">min-width</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 700px<span class="token punctuation">)</span></span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token selector">h2</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-size</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 22px<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">line-height</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 23px<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>(Ideally we shouldn’t be using pixels at all, but we’re sticking to that here for simplicity’s sake.)</p>
<p>Great, cool. We have our type styles for our heading. That’s ten lines of CSS for a single heading and two media queries though. In a lot of websites and apps I’ve worked on there’s at least 3 separate media queries for each heading from <code>h1</code> to <code>h6</code>. So this can easily lead to hundreds of lines of CSS just for your typography styles.</p>
<p>What makes things worse is this: imagine a designer on our team has now given us a mockup where that same content needs to be in the sidebar or in a card or in any other situation where things are smaller or larger. Well, dammit, our media query styles up there aren’t going to cut it now. That h2 is going to look far too large and janky in the sidebar. So what options do we have?</p>
<p>Hacks like this, sure...</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">.sidebar h2</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span> <span class="token punctuation">}</span> <span class="token comment">/* ew */</span><br /><span class="token selector">.sidebar-heading</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span> <span class="token punctuation">}</span> <span class="token comment">/* also ew */</span></code></pre>
<p>...or, perhaps even worse...</p>
<pre class="language-html"><code class="language-html"><span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"><</span>h3</span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span>A heading that should be a h2.<span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"></</span>h3</span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span></code></pre>
<p>...either way, we had to use some kind of hack because we had no choice but to bind the font-size and line-height with the size of the browser window. As cool as they are, that’s all that media queries allow.</p>
<p>What we’ve always needed is for that heading to scale based on the container you put it in. If you throw a h2 or a paragraph into a container that’s too wide or too short then we need our typographic styles to adjust in kind. This is especially true of the <code>line-height</code> CSS property which has always been a nightmare because we couldn’t make this relationship work.</p>
<p>Look at any codebase in any app and search for <code>line-height</code>. You’re bound to see hundreds of tiny hacks where folks are adjusting it over and over again:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css">line-height...<br />line-height...<br />line-height...<br />line-height...<br />line-height...<br />line-height...<br />line-height...</code></pre>
<p>Folks are just trying to make the text work in whatever container they’ve thrown a heading or a <code><p></code> tag in and the easiest thing to do is to add a class on the parent and be done with it.</p>
<p>This is because in typography the font-size, the line-height, and the measure (the width of the text) are all linked together. If you change one of these variables, you likely have to change the others in response.</p>
<p>Okay, so this is where container queries comes in; now in 2023 we no longer have to make hacks like those above since we can finally make the right kind of typographic relationship: between the text and the container you put it in. Let’s make an example to explain how container queries can help us.</p>
<p>To kick things off let’s write some good ol’ HTML:</p>
<pre class="language-html"><code class="language-html"><span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"><</span>div</span> <span class="token attr-name">class</span><span class="token attr-value"><span class="token punctuation attr-equals">=</span><span class="token punctuation">"</span>container large<span class="token punctuation">"</span></span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span><br /> <span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"><</span>h2</span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span>Yosemite National Park<span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"></</span>h2</span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span><br /> <span class="token comment"><!-- blah blah blah --></span><br /><span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"></</span>div</span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span><br /><br /><span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"><</span>div</span> <span class="token attr-name">class</span><span class="token attr-value"><span class="token punctuation attr-equals">=</span><span class="token punctuation">"</span>container<span class="token punctuation">"</span></span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span><br /> <span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"><</span>h2</span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span>Yosemite National Park<span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"></</span>h2</span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span><br /> <span class="token comment"><!-- blah blah blah --></span><br /><span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"></</span>div</span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span></code></pre>
<p>So here we have our two options, our content in a main body area and the sidebar content which we can style like so...</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">body</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">display</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> grid<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">grid-template-columns</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 1fr 1fr 1fr 1fr<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">gap</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 20px<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><br /><span class="token selector">.large</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">grid-column-start</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 1<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">grid-column-end</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 4<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>Great – we now have two containers that look something like this:</p>
<p class="codepen" data-height="500" data-default-tab="result" data-slug-hash="BaPramd" data-user="robinrendle" data-token="9bd01dd8b5f990cfc84c30310bf92495" style="height: 300px; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; border: 2px solid; margin: 1em 0; padding: 1em;">
<span>See the Pen <a href="https://codepen.io/robinrendle/pen/BaPramd/9bd01dd8b5f990cfc84c30310bf92495">
Container Queries + Typography</a> by Robin Rendle (<a href="https://codepen.io/robinrendle">@robinrendle</a>)
on <a href="https://codepen.io/">CodePen</a>.</span>
</p>
<script async="" src="https://cpwebassets.codepen.io/assets/embed/ei.js"></script>
<p>Look at the sidebar; things don’t look right since our line-height is wrong and the font-sizes are all too large. Something must be done about this! The horror!</p>
<p>To start using container queries we first need to tell the container to buckle up and pay attention, we’re going to start watching it’s size from here on out:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">.container</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">container-type</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> inline-size<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>In my dumb brain this “activates” container queries but this also does a bunch of other stuff I don’t want to dive into just yet. Don’t worry about that for now, it basically means we can now do something like this with our CSS:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token atrule"><span class="token rule">@container</span> <span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token property">max-width</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 480px<span class="token punctuation">)</span></span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token selector">h2</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">color</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> red<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><br /><span class="token atrule"><span class="token rule">@container</span> <span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token property">min-width</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 480px<span class="token punctuation">)</span></span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token selector">h2</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">color</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> blue<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>Look closely! That’s not a media query there, checking to see if the width of the browser window is a certain size. That right there is a container query; if the parent elements of our <code>h2</code> is less than 480px it’ll turn red or if it’s more than 480px then it’ll turn blue.</p>
<p>This seems like absolute magic to me, someone who fondly remembers the clearfixes of yesteryear, but it actually works in browsers today:</p>
<p class="codepen" data-height="500" data-default-tab="result" data-slug-hash="GRBxRyW" data-user="robinrendle" data-token="dde1a12e19afda52fce3f18e363baa8f" style="height: 300px; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; border: 2px solid; margin: 1em 0; padding: 1em;">
<span>See the Pen <a href="https://codepen.io/robinrendle/pen/GRBxRyW/dde1a12e19afda52fce3f18e363baa8f">
Container Queries + Typography 3</a> by Robin Rendle (<a href="https://codepen.io/robinrendle">@robinrendle</a>)
on <a href="https://codepen.io/">CodePen</a>.</span>
</p>
<p>Now, with <code>@container</code>, we can begin to customize our type styles in whatever way we’d like—and we’ll get to that—but I think all this container stuff is actually more powerful when you start to use <em>container query units</em> like this:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">h2</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-size</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 50cqw<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>What the what? This looks like some evil space magic.</p>
<p><code>1cqw</code> here equals 1% of our parent element’s width and what that means is that we can finally make our typography proportional to the size of its container but in a much tidier way. This is amazing! There’s all sorts of other values that we can use, too:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css">cqw<span class="token punctuation">,</span> cqh<span class="token punctuation">,</span> cqi<span class="token punctuation">,</span> cqb<span class="token punctuation">,</span> cqmin<span class="token punctuation">,</span> cqmax</code></pre>
<p>I’m not gonna dig into those since I’m still wrapping my head around all the things that the humble <code>cqw</code> unit unlocks.</p>
<p>Anyway, let’s get back to our example with the main content area and the sidebar. How do these units help us there? Well, we can set our paragraph font-size and line-height to expand and contract depending on the size of the container like this:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">p</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-size</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> <span class="token function">clamp</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>1rem<span class="token punctuation">,</span> 2.5cqw<span class="token punctuation">,</span> 2rem<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">line-height</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> <span class="token function">clamp</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>1.35rem<span class="token punctuation">,</span> 3.5cqw<span class="token punctuation">,</span> 1.9rem<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>Do you hear angels singing or is that just me? Here’s a quick example that shows the heading and body text adapt to the width of the parent...</p>
<p>(You might need to open this up on a bigger screen to see the full effect.)</p>
<p class="codepen" data-height="500" data-default-tab="result" data-slug-hash="vYaOyLp" data-user="robinrendle" data-token="09e61af4c82e13d6e49ee349ad55a3b9" style="height: 300px; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; border: 2px solid; margin: 1em 0; padding: 1em;">
<span>See the Pen <a href="https://codepen.io/robinrendle/pen/vYaOyLp/09e61af4c82e13d6e49ee349ad55a3b9">
Container Queries + Typography 3</a> by Robin Rendle (<a href="https://codepen.io/robinrendle">@robinrendle</a>)
on <a href="https://codepen.io/">CodePen</a>.</span>
</p>
<p>That code above might look like odd if you’re unfamiliar with this stuff but what we’re doing is setting a min font-size in <code>rem</code>, then we’re using that middle value of the <code>clamp()</code> function to tell the browser our ideal size in <code>cqw</code>, then finally a maximum font-size. That means our text will never get too big or too small and if a dev throws that paragraph into a sidebar or a card or something then our text will always look good.</p>
<p>Here’s an example of what hundreds of lines of CSS hacks could be cut down to with container queries:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">h1</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-size</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> <span class="token function">clamp</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>...<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">line-height</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> <span class="token function">clamp</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>...<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><br /><span class="token selector">h2</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-size</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> <span class="token function">clamp</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>...<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">line-height</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> <span class="token function">clamp</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>...<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><br /><span class="token selector">h3</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-size</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> <span class="token function">clamp</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>...<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">line-height</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> <span class="token function">clamp</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>...<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><br /><span class="token selector">h4</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-size</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> <span class="token function">clamp</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>...<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">line-height</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> <span class="token function">clamp</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>...<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><br /><span class="token selector">h5</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-size</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> <span class="token function">clamp</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>...<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">line-height</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> <span class="token function">clamp</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>...<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><br /><span class="token selector">h6</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-size</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> <span class="token function">clamp</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>...<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">line-height</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> <span class="token function">clamp</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>...<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><br /><span class="token selector">p</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-size</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> <span class="token function">clamp</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>...<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">line-height</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> <span class="token function">clamp</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>...<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>(Side note: this is just an example so I’ve removed the values, but also I have no idea how bad this is for performance. Feel free to shout at me here and I’ll add a note later.)</p>
<p>This stuff is beautiful to me, the perfect compliment to the CSS language. Container queries makes decades of typographic hacks irrelevant and so this kinda feels like the end of an era for me. I’m sure there are ten thousand other problems with CSS that I’m not aware of and a hundred amazing features coming in the near future but now my CSS bucket list is complete.</p>
<p>I feel like we need a name for this era, when CSS started getting real good. There’s a clear cut off point somewhere in the Before Times and the period we live in now, The Great CSS-ing. Perhaps it started with flexbox, or when CSS Grid launched, maybe that’s when things began to really accelerate. But typography is no longer a series of cool hacks and instead now a fully fledged citizen in the browser as of 2023. Us web typographers can finally create the relationships that we’ve always needed: font-size, line-height, measure.</p>
<p>My endless grumbles have come to an end.</p>
The Book Cover Review2023-01-17T16:00:55Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/book-cover-review/<p><a href="https://bookcoverreview.co.uk/">The Book Cover Review</a> is a great project by <a href="https://www.instagram.com/typeasimage/">David Pearson</a>; it’s a website with quick, 500-word reviews of book covers from guest designers, typographers, and writers. It all looks lovely! Fine typesetting, cute and slightly odd navigation, and gorgeous pictures to boot.</p>
<p>There’s only one unforgiveable flaw with this project: there’s no RSS feed. But it does look like this is an ongoing thing that folks will keep contributing to, so I’ll just keep popping back now and again to see what’s changed.</p>
Grumble Time2023-01-16T16:22:55Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/grumble-time/<p>It’s hard to be a person this morning. I find myself tired and angry, unsure of what to type, read, or do. My brisk early morning walk around the block is usually enough to jolt me awake as there’s ample time for a dazzling podcast or a blog post read in line waiting for coffee. Then—bam! The day has begun; it’s suddenly clear how much writing there is to be done, how much design there is to be designed. There are questions and feelings without any clear answers. I often have to restrain myself from sprinting back to my apartment with endless ideas and caffeinated enthusiasm in tow.</p>
<p>I usually burst into the apartment and start ranting at my fiancé: <em>Did you hear about the Fall of Constantinople and how the Ottoman Empire <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/distan/5023033060">dragged their boats onto land</a> and lifted them over the hills to then drop them into the Golden Horn???</em></p>
<p>But not today. I’m just mopey, I guess. A phased-out, turned-off sort of feeling with a headache off far in the distance; apathy has got its nasty grip on me.</p>
<p>Today I am the preface to <em>Delight</em> by J.B. Priestley:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I have always been a grumbler. All the records, going back to earliest childhood, establish this fact. Probably I arrived here a malcontent, convinced that I had been sent to the wrong planet. (And I feel even now there is something in this.) I was designed for the part, for I have a sagging face, a weighty underlip, what I am told is “a saurian eye”, and a rumbling but resonant voice from which it is difficult to escape. Money could not buy a better grumbling outfit.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This morning I am wearing my best grumbling outfit too, but I know that if I just sit here long enough something will snap, my malaise will evaporate, and the day will fall into place.</p>
<p>All I need is the right sound in a song, the right string of words in a sentence...</p>
The Case of the Golden Idol2023-01-11T16:02:11Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-case-of-the-golden-idol/<p>If you’ve yet to play <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/1677770/The_Case_of_the_Golden_Idol/">The Case of the Golden Idol</a> then here’s another, louder reminder: go play it! It’s a fabulous detective game made up of a series of puzzles in which you have to figure out who is who, how they got murdered, and then why. You investigate murder weapons and fraudulent keys, you dive into the victim’s pockets to inspect charred lottery tickets and letters, you dig through desks and find secret compartments under people’s beds, all in the hope that a sliver of information will be revealed that cracks the case wide open.</p>
<p>As you try to solve each of these grizzly murders in a story that takes place over a few decades, you realize that it’s real hard to tell much about a person when you can’t hear them talk or see them move. You can only see their belongings in this game and you have to make associations and conclusions — conclusions that are often wrong! — and so the world is constantly moving about and changing as you investigate things.</p>
<p>I think it’s the best game like this I’ve played since <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/653530/Return_of_the_Obra_Dinn/">Return of the Obra Dinn</a>; it’s infuriatingly good.</p>
labour of love2023-01-05T16:06:04Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/labour-of-love/<p>Jenny on <a href="https://phirephoenix.com/blog/2022-10-18/work">the relationship between your job and The Good Work™</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I love work, by which I mean I love the feeling of focusing my energy toward a particular goal and watching the nebulous mist between here and there slowly thin to reveal wobbly, winding stepping stones. I love the satisfaction of a certain type of exhaustion that comes from having pitted my brain and my hands against a problem and found myself a little closer to who I want to be.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I get this feeling ever so rarely but it’s the kind of work I aspire to, the kind of work that makes me jealous as I read <em><a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow-gabrielle-zevin/17502475?ean=9780593321201">Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow</a></em> by Gabrielle Zevin; the work worthy of obsession.</p>
Fragments2023-01-04T16:50:54Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/fragments/<blockquote>
<p>When readers in Western Europe turned their eyes to printed books, around the middle of the 15th century, handwritten books became old-fashioned, unwanted, and ultimately obsolete. Bookbinders began to disassemble medieval manuscripts and recycle their strong parchment leaves as binding materials. Thousands were systematically destroyed over the next two centuries...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That’s Erik Kwakkel back in November writing about how old manuscripts are still found <a href="https://medievalbooks.nl/2022/11/30/medieval-manuscript-fragments-in-the-classroom/">hidden in the bindings of printed 16th century books</a>. This is a tragedy—the loss!—but there’s also something dreadfully romantic about it and how we’re all making books out of other people’s books. If you crack open a book and tear out all the pages, then somehow underneath you’re likely to find a secret book buried inside. That’s cute!</p>
<p>Thanks to this paper recycling and the ravages of time, mostly fragments of these old manuscripts survive. Erik argues that these fragments are better than the full text for teaching though; they’re easier to read and hold, without the risk of breaking anything. You can put your grubby little hands on them without fear that you’re doing colossal damage to a priceless treasure.</p>
<p>But there’s a picture that Erik snaps at the The University of British Columbia where the conservation specialist had framed one of these fragments in a rather beautiful way...</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/manuscript.webp" alt="A photography by Erik Kwakkel of a manuscript fragment bound in the center of a large canvas. It shows where the rest of the manuscript likely was and how much of the sheet that’s been lost to time." /></p>
<p>I love this picture so very much. It’s like—look at everything we’ve lost! We’ve preserved so very little of our past and the work of those who came before us and this little fragment at the center of this canvas illustrates that loss. But, also, look at this cute little boy we saved; he’s so tiny! He is delicate and soft and battered by time.</p>
<p>We must preserve him forever.</p>
Shift Happens2023-01-03T17:00:50Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/shift-happens/<p>Marcin’s upcoming book about typewriters, <em>Shift Happens</em>, now has <a href="https://shifthappens.site/">a glorious website</a> where you can see what the finished thing is going to look like:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Shift Happens is full of stories – some never before told – interleaved with 1,000+ beautiful full-color photos across two volumes. This edition features an extra volume of additional illustrations and “making of” material, and everything comes wrapped in a slipcase. It’s a great gift for keyboard or typewriter aficionados, but also suits everyone who cares about design, the stories of everyday objects, or tech history.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Oh and make sure to check out the bananas 3D demo where you can click around the book and see just how much work Marcin has poured into this project. I’m so very excited to get my hands on the finished thing; it’s going to be really quite special.</p>
The Year in Words2023-01-01T16:25:02Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-year-in-words/<p>The new year is upon us! As I’ve lounged around the Christmas tree and drunk as much mulled wine as humanly possible (alas not that much because I am weak), I’ve been wondering if this was a good year for writing. What did I get done? Did things slip or was progress made? So I’m introducing a new tradition here: let’s look back at the last twelve months of writing and see if there’s any patterns or anything to watch out for in the future.</p>
<p>This should act as a jolt of encouragement to do better in the new year and help me figure out what good writing is; what I should push towards and what I ought to run away from. Let’s begin!</p>
<h2 id="so-was-last-year-good-for-writing" tabindex="-1">So, was last year good for writing? <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-year-in-words/#so-was-last-year-good-for-writing" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Yes! Here’s the year by numbers: 90 notes, 1 essay, 34 newsletters, 12 newsletters for CSS-Tricks, and 2 posts for Sentry. That’s a lot of typing! I’m happy that I’ve been publishing a lot more on my blog too but what I’m most proud of is the experimentation in style, tone, and topic. Not everything worked—many pieces were very clunky—but I want to keep that momemtum going in 2023.</p>
<p>Can I keep up the pace of this short-term work alongside longer written pieces that may take months/years to complete? We’ll see, but that’s the big question for this year.</p>
<h2 id="new-design-new-process" tabindex="-1">New Design, New Process <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-year-in-words/#new-design-new-process" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>In June I introduced a lot of design changes: the wall of text on the homepage with links to each post is likely the most striking change, and I still think it’s neat!</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/homepage-2022.webp" alt="A screenshot of the homepage" /></p>
<p>It’s overwhelming and weird, as if the contents of my mind are spilling out onto the page. I’m also enjoying the big type changes I introduced around the same time, like on the /essays page where they’re taking up all the space in the world:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/essays-2022.webp" alt="A screenshot of the Essays page" /></p>
<p>Look at that wobbly text! Yeah!</p>
<h2 id="welcome-new-readers!" tabindex="-1">Welcome, New Readers! <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-year-in-words/#welcome-new-readers!" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>The average number of monthly readers went from around ~9k to ~13k this year. I don’t trust these numbers too much since I only check analytics once every other month but I’ve noticed an uptick in folks returning to my site which is nice. I also don’t care too much if that readership expands a lot in the new year either but what I <em>do</em> care about is diversifying that group of folks; writing outside of web design/front-end circles might be the biggest/scariest goal for 2023.</p>
<h2 id="the-highlights" tabindex="-1">The Highlights <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-year-in-words/#the-highlights" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Huh. It’s interesting that there were months where I barely wrote anything at all and it wasn’t really until June of this year that I started typing like hell. The new design was to thank for that but also a lot of technical changes to the way I publish things: making my website easier to deploy taught me that the fewer barriers you have between you and your blog, the better you’ll blog. Duh.</p>
<p>Anyway, let’s take a look at some of the highlights!</p>
<h3 id="i." tabindex="-1">I. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-year-in-words/#i." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>In January I wrote about <a href="http://robinrendle.com/notes/like-clockwork/">clocks and my partner</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>C is a great force, a little combustible engine of focus and care and love on the smallest of scales; she physically cannot sit still without fixing something nearby. And whilst a great wave of despair consumes me where I’m basically useless for days or weeks thereafter, C is always sat somewhere nearby, mending things.</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="ii." tabindex="-1">II. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-year-in-words/#ii." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>Later that same month I was promoted to senior product designer and <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/promotion/">I felt real weird about it</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>How the hell can I be a senior anything at this point in my life? If I was a chef in the restaurant of <em>Jiro Dreams of Sushi</em> then I would only now have progressed to the stage where I’m allowed to hold the eggs.</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="iii." tabindex="-1">III. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-year-in-words/#iii." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>In mid March, Chris announced that <a href="https://css-tricks.com/newsletter/294-an-announcement/">Digital Ocean had acquired CSS-Tricks</a> and it felt like a good time to hang up my front-end apron and say goodbye to my weekly routine of writing the CSS-Tricks newsletter:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>How dare I get all sappy about saying goodbye to a newsletter. But this is the longest-running project of my career! Almost 300 weeks of drama! 300,000 words! That’s more than a Moby Dick of CSS rants! So although at the beginning I was somewhat terrified (how on earth are we going to keep writing about this, we’re going to run out of useful things to say, “agh”, etc.) I think that covering every bit of front-end drama has ultimately made me a better writer, a better designer, and a better lover (okay this was the last bad joke I will write here, I deserve this).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I followed that up with a piece about <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/an-ode-to-css-tricks/">how thankful I am</a> for working with <a href="https://chriscoyier.net/">Chris</a> and <a href="https://geoffgraham.me/">Geoff</a> and the whole team.</p>
<h3 id="iv." tabindex="-1">IV. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-year-in-words/#iv." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>Back in April I wrote about a trip to the UK where <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/church-going/">I struggled meeting my family for the first time in almost three years</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A conversation with my family is like trying to gather shards of broken glass in your hands, and looking back on conversations with them I remember only fragments. Plus, talking about this stuff is depressing as all hell because you want to imagine your parents as being charming and dazzling, brilliant and funny. Everyone wants their parents to be heroic.</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="v." tabindex="-1">V. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-year-in-words/#v." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>In June I published <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/essays/in-praise-of-shadows/">In Praise of Shadows</a>, a review of the Fujifilm X100V:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>To put it simply: this camera is in constant <em>shhhh</em> mode.</p>
<p>And through this constant <em>shhhh</em>-ing, it encourages you to perk up and look closely.</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="vi." tabindex="-1">VI. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-year-in-words/#vi." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>In August I started work on a book version of my newsletter, <em>Adventures in Typography</em>, and <a href="https://buttondown.email/adventures/archive/just-make-the-damn-book/">wrote about it for the first time</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Here’s the plan. Collect a bunch of short stories from this here newsletter, Adventures in Typography, edit them, cajole them, weld them together...</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="vii." tabindex="-1">VII. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-year-in-words/#vii." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>By September that small project then turned into a much bigger thing; a real physical book. In an effort to keep myself accountable, I started a pop-up(ish) newsletter called <a href="https://hownottomakeabook.com/notes/tk/"><em>How Not to Make A Book</em></a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Each week we’re gonna draw a very rough outline and then, with each new edition, we’ll zoom in and poke and prod these 19,748 words until there’s something dazzling by the end.</p>
<p>And I hope you stick around because this is going to be a lot of fun.</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="viii." tabindex="-1">VIII. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-year-in-words/#viii." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>Later that month I wrote about how <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/i-don%E2%80%99t-believe-in-sprints/">I don’t believe in sprints</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sprints and backlogs and pointing tickets—the nigh-on universal method for making software today—is stupid. All this junk around the work makes software slower and more difficult to build. It’s form-filling monkey work and the only way we can improve the quality of software is to throw all those best practices away.</p>
<p>(Hot take alert!)</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="ix." tabindex="-1">IX. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-year-in-words/#ix." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>A week later I then wrote about <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/take-care-of-your-blog-/">taking care of your blog</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Blog your heart out! Blog about something you’ve learned, blog about something you’re interested in. Blog about cameras or HTML or that one browser bug you’ve noticed this morning or blog about the sky above you right this very second. How many clouds are up there?</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="x." tabindex="-1">X. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-year-in-words/#x." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>In October I found myself flailing all about the place, struggling with <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/take-a-break-you-idiot/">working too hard and for too long</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I know the cure: work less! Take a break! Stop doing things and do even fewer things than you think you ought to! Take a week! Take two! Stop all forms of work, go exercise and write, go learn how to do something entirely else. But each time I forget my own advice until I’m at this point, where I am now: basically useless.</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="xi." tabindex="-1">XI. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-year-in-words/#xi." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>With those last few posts exploding in attention—much, much more than I’m familiar or comfortable with—I wrote about <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/the-right-kind-of-attention/">the right kind of attention</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>106,820 people visited my website last week. Two posts had been upvoted to the top of the orange website and a hellish amount of attention was suddenly thrown my way.</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="xii." tabindex="-1">XII. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-year-in-words/#xii." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>A few days later I wrote about <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/monarch/">an old photograph in my parent’s kitchen</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Somewhere in this sea of mustaches is my great grandfather on my mom’s side, William French. He could be any one of these faces; there’s no blondish hair, big-ish noses, or any other genetic quirk of chance that’s familiar to me. All these men look the same, and I could be related to each and every one of them.</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="xiii." tabindex="-1">XIII. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-year-in-words/#xiii." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>I learned an important lesson at the end of the year, about <a href="https://sentry.design/blog/design-is-politics">how design is politics</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Let me frame it like this instead: great design only ships when you care for the people you’re pitching it to. That’s politics. And that’s something worth repeating until it sticks.</p>
</blockquote>
<h3 id="xiv." tabindex="-1">XIV. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-year-in-words/#xiv." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>Finally I wrote about <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/the-last-walk/">the last walk with our dog</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The boy is now struggling to walk around the block so I rub my nose, wipe my eyes, and pick him up. He is a warm potato, soft and cozy with his wiry hair poking out of his little jacket. He is heavy and round too, but my favorite thing about him is how he smells. A dozen wet old men have dried themselves with the same dirty towel. That is what this boy smells like.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2 id="so-what's-the-goal-for-2023" tabindex="-1">So what’s the goal for 2023? <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-year-in-words/#so-what's-the-goal-for-2023" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<ol>
<li>Finish the book</li>
<li>Start a new essay</li>
<li>Work with a new publication</li>
<li>Connect with other writers</li>
</ol>
<p>What I like about these goals is that they’re ambitious without a hint of desperation. There’s no “to the moon!” thinking here that would lead to stress or disappoinment. I’m not planning on becoming the next Shakespeare but I do plan on taking my work to the next step—whatever that might mean—and polish my writing slowly over long periods of time. Bigger pieces! Better stories! Weirder styles and tones and voices!</p>
<p>There’s so much potential for progress to be made. I can feel it.</p>
<p>To the new year!</p>
How to Distort Text with SVG Filters2022-12-27T00:17:35Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/how-to-distort-text-with-svg-filters/<p>Ya know something I’ve never played with before? SVG filters. Sure, I’ve taken a look at the tutorials and clicked around a few Pens here and there, but I’ve never fully invested in them as I didn’t ever see the point—I’m never going to work on big illustrationy stuff so eh, it’s just not for me. Thankfully however, Henry Desroches has shown just how wrong I am when he wrote this great piece the other day about <a href="https://henry.codes/writing/how-to-distort-text-with-svg/">how to distort text with SVG filters</a>.</p>
<p>This inspired me to experiment with them on my own site after stealing some of Henry’s code and I kind of like it! When you hover over the links on my homepage now, each of them will suddenly look as if they were printed with a blotchy, messed up stamp. Also I updated the main headings on /about, /notes, etc. to use the same stamp effect and I think it looks pretty neat.</p>
<p>I spent a little bit of time animating these SVG filters but it looks like it requires a lot of <a href="https://greensock.com/gsap/">GSAP</a> magic to get working and eh, I kinda don’t want a ton of javascript just for this one off animation. It would be <em>really</em> neat if I could animate these filter properties with custom CSS properties but after faffing about for 15 mins I bailed and went back to watching Bullet Train.</p>
<p>ANYWAY. Go read Henry’s post because it’s great and reminded me that I shouldn’t just slap a nice font on a website and be done with it. There’s so many design opportunities after a typeface has been chosen and I need to remind myself of that in the future.</p>
Moving Timelines2022-12-23T16:32:23Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/moving-timelines/<p>A couple of months ago I moved my day-to-day internet life to Mastodon and you can find me here:</p>
<p><a href="https://sfba.social/@fonts">fonts@sfba.social</a></p>
<p>It almost, sort of, kinda feels like the fowl place back in 2008 or so when folks shared pictures of cool daffodils and micro-blogged the heck out of their coffee run instead of pandering for likes and retweets with hot takes. But I contributed to that, too! And I feel bad about it! Although I’m still hopeful that Mastodon won’t turn into that! We’ll see!</p>
<p>To be honest, I don’t know what my relationship with the internet will look like after the heat death of the fowl place. For now I’m just gonna focus on this here website, but this new timeline feels like an okay place to lurk in the short term.</p>
Style Queries are Mind Boggling2022-12-23T03:29:24Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/style-queries-are-mind-boggling/<p>Ahmad Shadeed wrote <a href="https://ishadeed.com/article/css-container-style-queries/">a fantastic thing about style queries</a> the other day that I’m still trying to wrap my head around:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Recently, the Chrome team released experimental support for a new proposed CSS spec, style queries. In short, they let us query the style of a container, rather than the size only.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So the idea is that you might want to style something whether or not another chunk of CSS is enabled, like a display property or a variable. With this experimental feature you can check to see if a property exists like this:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token atrule"><span class="token rule">@container</span> <span class="token function">style</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token property">display</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> flex<span class="token punctuation">)</span></span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token selector">.element</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">padding</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 10px<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>So, if this <code>.element</code> has <code>display: flex</code>, then add some padding.</p>
<p>That’s...weird! Even looking at Shadeed’s examples I can’t think of a time when I would ever want to do that instead of writing a new CSS class. But maybe I’m still trying to wrap my head around this thing. Although this is where things make more sense to me...</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token atrule"><span class="token rule">@container</span> <span class="token function">style</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token property">--theme</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> dark<span class="token punctuation">)</span></span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token selector">.section</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">background-color</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> #222<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">color</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> #fff<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>...check if the dark theme has been enabled and then turn styles on and off, which opens up a lot more options to us than just changing the style via variables alone.</p>
<p>But I think this is where I’m confused: testing to see if the properties of another element are enabled, and <em>then</em> do something. Like say we have a nav class:</p>
<pre class="language-html"><code class="language-html"><span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"><</span>nav</span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span><br /> <span class="token comment"><!-- List of nav items --></span><br /><span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"></</span>nav</span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span></code></pre>
<p>And now we want to make that list of items horizontal with a class...</p>
<pre class="language-html"><code class="language-html"><span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"><</span>div</span> <span class="token attr-name">class</span><span class="token attr-value"><span class="token punctuation attr-equals">=</span><span class="token punctuation">"</span>nav-horizontal<span class="token punctuation">"</span></span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span><br /> <span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"><</span>nav</span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span><br /> <span class="token comment"><!-- List of nav items --></span><br /> <span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"></</span>nav</span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span><br /><span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"></</span>div</span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span></code></pre>
<p>...and <em>then</em> in my CSS I could do something like this I guess?</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">.nav-horizontal</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">--horizontal</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> true<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><br /><span class="token atrule"><span class="token rule">@container</span> <span class="token function">style</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token property">--horizontal</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> true<span class="token punctuation">)</span></span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token selector">nav</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">display</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> flex<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>If I don’t want this nav to be horizontal, then I can just remove the parent class. But maybe this is a bad example cus I would just make another class here anyway and that doesn’t really make things much clearer to me what the relationship is between all these things.</p>
<p>Anyway, just thinking out loud here. This currently hurts my brain but it feels like it opens up a ton of doors so I needed to jot this down and curse you all with my confusion.</p>
;2022-12-20T16:41:14Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/semicolon/<blockquote>
<p>For a start, when we consider rules, we have to ask: <em>whose</em> rules?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That’s Cecelia Watson writing about punctuation and grammar in the fabulous little book I read last night called <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/semicolon-the-past-present-and-future-of-a-misunderstood-mark-cecelia-watson/7985857?ean=9780062853059"><em>Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark</em></a>. It is excellent and you should go read it but Watson’s argument can be summarized like this: good grammar — and how to use a semicolon in particular — shouldn’t be seen as a holy edict that we must adhere to but rather a tool for a specific kind of job instead; creating emphasis; expanding and contracting space itself; elaborating on an idea over a longer stretch of time than you might otherwise give it; letting your mind wonder a little bit.</p>
<p>Watson argues that a good semicolon can do magical things but the rules around grammar are extremely dumb, often racist, and get in our way if we hope to communicate clearly or write beautiful things. Although I must say that this bit certainly hurt reading:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...the dash nowadays is the Punctuation Mark of First Resort, able to take the place of commas, colons, semicolons, and periods. We now live in the Era of the Dash. Dashes are dashed off right and left...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Oof — I’ve been thinking lately about how I lean too hard on the em dash. It’s almost too easy to throw into a sentence — barely much thought is required to connect two thoughts together. It’s important to note that Watson’s argument against the use of the dash here isn’t that it’s <em>aGaInST tHe RuLEs man</em> but instead because it’s a tool that we use too often and now has less effect than perhaps it once did.</p>
<p>The semicolon though? That’s a thing with real, untapped power:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The semicolon represents a way to slow down, to stop, and to think; it measures time more meditatively than the catchall dash, and it can’t be chucked thoughtlessly into just any sentence in place of just any other mark.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But Cecelia doesn’t like rules when it comes to punctuation and consistently pokes holes in stuffy remarks about grammar:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Even if you accept everything I’ve said in this book about rules, you might still feel, deep down, a love for the idea of grammar rules. But when it comes down to it, I’d wager that the object of your love lies elsewhere. That love is really for the English language, or for orderliness and organization, or for tradition. None of these things is a foolish thing to love. But if we really love English, or if we love the sense of structure that grammar provides, or if we love traditions and a sense of shared linguistic practices across generations, we have to look somewhere else to celebrate that devotion; rules will be, just as they always have been, inadequate to form a protective fence around English. We will never find <em>the</em> rules, unshiftable, unchangeable and incorruptible. There are no such things.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I remember in an old English class a professor once lost it and shouted at me that I didn’t know how to use the semicolon correctly; now I’m gonna throw it in everywhere just to haunt him. We made these rules up! They’re maleable! Just as Watson says, there has never been a proper English, and anyone who says otherwise is masking darker, deeper, racist opinions about who is white and is not. I’ll repeat this, but louder:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...when we consider rules, we have to ask: <em>whose</em> rules?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>One example Watson gives is of David Foster Wallace; he believed that there is the one and true and proper way to communicate, <a href="https://www.thesmartset.com/david-foster-wallaces-problematic-tenses/">even if you don’t like it</a>. He used his classrooms to pitch a certain kind of grammar, a certain kind of thinking that treated punctuation like a prison; these are the boxes to think inside of; this is how you must speak; this is who you must sound like or otherwise be cast out of society. But language and punctuation and grammar, Watson argues over and over again in her book, should be a liberator. David Foster Wallace was wrong.</p>
<p>So anyway, Watson’s book reminds me that folks who are sticklers for proper punctuation are my mortal enemies.</p>
<p>And I was sent from hell to ruin their lives.</p>
IndieKit2022-12-19T15:51:43Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/indiekit/<p>Note to self: this week you need to sit down and play around with <a href="https://getindiekit.com/">IndieKit</a>, a tool that lets you publish things to your website. Here’s Paul Robert Lloyd writing about <a href="https://paulrobertlloyd.com/articles/2022/12/indiekit/">why he built this thing and what it does</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Today I’m formally launching Indiekit, the little Node.js server with all the parts needed to publish content to your personal website and share it on social networks.</p>
<p>Think of Indiekit as the missing link between a statically generated website and the social web protocols developed by the IndieWeb community and recommended by the W3C.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m real excited about this! I’ve had to build my own kinda CMS setup for working on this here website but it falls short in many ways. In fact, I often feel like I have to make many small usability sacrifices in order to publish things independently on the web. But why does our writing/publishing experience have to suck just because we don’t want to buy into big SAAS apps?</p>
<p>Paul strongly believes that we can do better and so I’m super excited to go down this rabbit hole and see what I can learn about all this tonight.</p>
Novelist as a Vocation2022-12-14T19:34:40Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/novelist-as-a-vocation-/<p>Ya know when a book might not be the best thing ever written but it’s the perfect book for you at that very moment? That’s what Haruki Murakami’s <em>Novelist as a Vocation</em> was for me this weekend. I read this thing with righteous fury as for the first time in years I sat in a quiet room—from a cabin perched on a bluff overlooking a wild and roaring ocean—and gobbled up the whole thing in a day.</p>
<p>Why haven’t I read a whole book in forever? And why was it this one that caught my eye?</p>
<p>Well, here’s the thing; Murakami writes about how he became a novelist and what his daily routine is and I’m a big sucker for this stuff. Although it’s worth noting that I’m not a rabid Murakami fan, as I find his novels way too slow and I always want something with a much quicker step. But I still found this book hypnotic. Sure, it’s a rambling, unfocused thing and I kinda disagree with huge chunks of it but that’s besides the point. When Murakami writes about the discipline required to write novels then I am 100% here for it sign me up let’s go.</p>
<p>As I was reading Murakami’s book I realized that I’ve trained myself for a certain kind of writing: short, tiny things that are self-contained. They only take an hour or two to write as I’m so focused on the production of writing (getting a blog post or newsletter out into the world) that I tend to ignore what these things might be if I gave them a bit more time. Writing for me is a rushed, hurried thing; something to be done on a plane or at the back of a cafe. My writing is frantic, sporadic, infrequent. But Murakami? Slow, back-achingly slow. And constant, every day, without fail.</p>
<p>I’ve <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/on-writing/">moaned about this before</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’ve treated my writing like this: as a hobby, not a job. I’ve treated it all so very lightly, being caught up in the hubbub of the design and engineering worlds that I forget that those are things I do for rent money but the writing is who I am...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Murakami’s book opens up these anxieties again. Kind of.</p>
<p>My point is that he takes his damn time to write a novel. Huge, great seeping buckets of time. The oceans will boil and this bluff will fall into the ocean but Murakami doesn’t care. Murakami has barely finished writing chapter one. The heat death of the universe will roar passed and Murakami won’t blink an eye.</p>
<p>Through this book, <em>Novelist as a Vocation</em>, he talks about his relationship with time, how he cloisters himself away and lets the passage of it wash over him and his work like a river polishing a stone. There’s no rush to hit the publish button today! No flashing lights and urgent sirens calls warning him that these words need to see daylight any time soon! No editor or collaborator stealing away his attention and his focus! All that exists is the writing.</p>
<p>I look at Murakami’s work—and perhaps this very idealized version of himself he’s portraying—and I see myself addicted to the little green publish button. I rush my writing, which makes it clumsy. I hit ‘publish’ at the expense of the writing itself. Not every thought needs to be published, or every word spoken, but that’s sort of how I treat my writing. And maybe that’s not great!</p>
<p>There’s a moment when Murakami talks about his novel-writing approach: he’ll write 1600 words a day (woof) and then he’ll just write that novel from start to finish without any rewrites. Characters half way through his first draft will get renamed, reorganized, reshuffled. The plot and tone and shape of the novel will unravel and then break. Dogs will disappear around a corner and reemerge as cats. Nothing makes a lick of sense. But that’s not the point. Heck, good writing isn’t even the point of the first draft. That’s for the second draft. After the first, he’ll put away his manuscript for a week or two. There’s no rush. Then, when he returns, he find a confusing, bewildering manuscript. Something he doesn’t recognize. The book has transformed in his desk drawer but Murakami has given this thing so much time that he now knows what it ought to be. Letting time pass over the work is almost as important as doing the work itself.</p>
<p>So I envy Murakami. Not for his novels or his fame or his international bestselling success or even for the way that he writes, but for the way he approaches time and uses it—just like any other tool—to get great writing done.</p>
An Internet of Zines2022-12-10T03:04:17Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/an-internet-of-zines/<p>Chris has a lot of exciting stuff to say <a href="https://chriscoyier.net/2022/12/08/whats-good-about-the-arc-browser/">about Arc here</a> and why he hasn’t been interested in other browsers until now:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’ve developed some doubts about how much value a skin over an existing browser engine can actually bring. Like, don’t build me a browser with a built-in crypto wallet or whatever. Don’t want it, don’t need it. I’d rather have the lightest-weight browser I can get and let me change things with proper Web Extensions, or so I thought.</p>
<p>My mind has changed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sounds like Arc is catching on! Chris then digs into all the tiny details about what makes Arc so great and amongst my favorites is not even a feature at all: each week they consistently blog about their updates and I am genuinely <em>excited</em> about them. I often drop whatever I’m doing to read them and see what weird experiments they’re up to. How many apps can you say that about?</p>
<p>Arc has been my main browser for a couple of months and I’ve been trying to experiment with as many of the <em>weird</em> features as I can. Take easels, for example. It’s a tool within the Arc browser that lets you write and draw within it and then share it to the rest of the web. Here’s <a href="https://arc.net/e/00EEA26F-3EE4-4B9B-AE1D-8716148A1CB3">an example of an easel</a>—click that link and think about what this kind of thing opens up! Collaborative browser tools!</p>
<p>Robin also wrote about this exciting time we’re in right now—new browsers and website powers and social media titans falling by the wayside. I think he captures <a href="https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/new-avenues/">the excitement of this moment</a> well:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Spend some time with Arc, <a href="https://arc.net/">the new browser</a> from The Browser Company of New York. It’s an opinionated application that’s currently flexing and morphing as the team embroiders in fresh ideas. Using the app at this stage in its development feels almost like following the new season of a TV show.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I couldn’t agree more — it’s exciting to rethink what a browser ought to be. But this reminds me: the other day someone said “an internet of zines” at me and I haven’t been able to think about anything else since. I think that’s what’s so exciting about Arc—it feels like a thing that could become a printing press for zines.</p>
<p>So Arc is already real nice but it’s easy to see the future, the raw <em>potential</em> for a browser that doesn’t just plug your whole life into a search engine, but one instead that’s made from the ground up to help us build a better web.</p>
The Last Walk2022-12-09T18:09:47Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-last-walk/<p>As we walk in the twilight-sunset-dark I find myself sniffling, then crying, then that other kind of crying. You know the kind, that overwhelming and heaving motion that takes full control but no matter how strong and disciplined I want to be for my partner I can’t find it in myself to stop. I’m crying because although here we are, together in this beautiful crisp evening, with this little dog by our side, tomorrow there’ll be no more walks, no more laughing at how awkward this round dog is, no more giggling when he waddles to his favorite bush. There’ll be no more grunts or awkward side-eyes, no more floppy ears and tongues poking between teeth. This is the last time, the last flickering moments of us together, and our last walk.</p>
<p>Tomorrow, before there’s too much pain, the vet will come. It’s the kindest thing for him now.</p>
<p>Through tears I look up at the stars muted in the sky. Only a few bright sparks are strong enough to break through the ambient city skylight and a contrail is weaving its way steadily across the sunset of dark purples and swirling orange. The few stars we see up there are permanent fixtures as everlasting as any everlasting thing could be but tonight it all looks so very fragile. It feels as if the stars are about to pop out of place, shake themselves free, and then tumble out of the sky because if this one thing—walking with this tiny round dog and my partner in hand—is not infinite and everlasting, then I don’t think I can trust the stars again.</p>
<p>Why am I crying? First: shut up. Second: I am crying because I already miss him. I’m crying because I admire my partner for making this hard decision for her childhood dog. She has chosen to do this terribly difficult thing despite pressure from her family to ignore the problem and make this boy suffer for it. She is brave when hard decisions are necessary and I’m crying because I want to be more like her.</p>
<p>The boy is now struggling to walk around the block so I rub my nose, wipe my eyes, and pick him up. He is a warm potato, soft and cozy with his wiry hair poking out of his little jacket. He is heavy and round too, but my favorite thing about him is how he smells. A dozen wet old men have dried themselves with the same dirty towel. That is what this boy smells like.</p>
<p>We turn the corner—two more to go—and we see the sunset in full glory. There are clouds peeking out from the sides and I have recovered a bit now. Everything is so peaceful out there, so very quiet, without anyone in the world. A great hush has descended upon San Francisco and it’s just us; me, my partner, and this boy. Winter has come but we are warm and safe and happy together.</p>
<p>As we walk around the next corner—one more left—I start thinking about what grief is, how it works, how to live alongside it. It feels like grief is an intergalactic atom bomb of sadness and misery that tears apart everything in its wake but as I look at this boy in my arms I know that grief isn’t that. Grief is love crushed into a tiny dot, love bottled up over years and years, love distilled into a single atom only to explode and release all its energy at the moment something terrible happens. I remember what my therapist said a while ago, that grief can’t be argued against, it can’t be intellectually maneuvered or circumnavigated. “Grief is grief,” he said. And it’s true. But knowing that doesn’t help me because I am still scared for tomorrow, I am still scared for the bomb and for the grief. I’m just not ready. I don’t want to say goodbye. I want to hold this old dog in my arms forever. I want to stay on this block, frozen in this happy place.</p>
<p>Just as we turn the next corner—the very last one—I’ve put him down now, he is no longer in my arms, and my partner turns to me in the impermanent-orange-glow of a streetlight. She asks me if I’m okay. Endless tears. Eternal, everlasting tears. Even in moments when her life is shaking to bits, she wants to make sure that everyone else is okay first. And so I struggle to keep my voice steady, I struggle to say the words.</p>
<p>Up there the sunset has dulled, as if it could be held in the palm of our hands—the sky is a dark and purple stone as now the sunset jewel and diamonds of sunshine have left us for the horizon—then, suddenly, everything is black.</p>
<p>“Yes,” I lie to her and look down at the boy who then turns his tiny head to look up at me.</p>
<p>“I think I’m okay.”</p>
Design is Politics2022-12-09T01:06:21Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/design-is-politics/<p>For the Sentry blog I wrote about some of my experiences at work, like learning how to gather consensus and <a href="https://sentry.design/blog/design-is-politics">how to be political</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When I first heard that you have to “sell” your designs many moons ago though I was horrified. Shouldn’t great design be obvious? Why do I have to sell it when the design work itself is hard enough? Shouldn’t beautiful work be celebrated and encouraged, not bartered and fought for? For years I would blame the person I was pitching my designs to for their lack of understanding, their lack of vision. How dare they not recognize my genius! The nerve!</p>
</blockquote>
Typographica Turns 202022-12-03T20:55:54Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/typographica-turns-20/<p>Stephen Coles celebrates Typographica’s 20th year with a look back through the archives and <a href="https://typographica.org/on-typography/typographica-is-twenty-years-old/">how the site began</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Looking back at the bite-size, mostly-text, link-laden posts of those first few months, it becomes clear: early Typographica was essentially Type Twitter before there was Twitter. It was a daily stream of links to and from other blogs, of breaking industry news that wouldn’t get covered in printed media until weeks later, of projects and observations, deep thoughts and plain silliness.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m a huge fan of Typographica and I hope that, with the renewed interest in blogging and caring for our own private places on the web, Typographica can continue to flourish.</p>
Late Night Tinkering2022-12-01T17:53:22Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/late-night-tinkering/<p>Last night, in a heated web design rage, I redesigned the tiny website of my newsletter, <a href="https://hownottomakeabook.com/">How Not To Make A Book</a>. It bugged me for a while that I didn’t have archives of all the posts that are sent out via Buttondown and now it feels pretty good to read these missives <a href="https://hownottomakeabook.com/notes/the-difference-that-makes-all-the-difference/">in this format</a>.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/how-not-to-make-a-book.png" alt="A screenshot of the website" /></p>
<p>I want to keep each website as simple as possible so adding a CMS or something is always a nightmare that I want to avoid. I opted for Eleventy here instead and my god I always forget how great it is. There’s a few tricky things, like not knowing what comes out of the box versus what functions you need to write yourself, but once that mental model of Eleventy fits together in your head then you can snap websites together like a big puzzle. It’s fantastic.</p>
<p>Although, the project isn’t anywhere near perfect yet and so here’s what I need to do next:</p>
<ul>
<li>Add an RSS feed</li>
<li>Polish the visual design</li>
<li>Fix the line-height/font-sizes</li>
</ul>
<p>But hey! It’s slowly coming together and I’ve always believed that websites are different from other kinds of software where you can iterate and iterate slowly over time. So long as you’re heading in the right direction, all the bumps in the road will smooth themselves out.</p>
<p>Anyway, Eleventy is great and websites are cool as hell.</p>
2,392 days2022-11-30T16:24:51Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/2,392-days/<p>I’ve waited many days for this little thing. It’s just a tiny bit of plastic that showed up in the mail this morning. No fanfare, no angels singing, no warm, bright light. It’s just a tiny envelope, but one that happens to alter the trajectory of my life in untold ways. Yet I can’t describe how I feel, how I ought to feel, besides the <em>everything</em> I’ve felt in all that time. There were anxious late nights walking around my apartment, lunch-time calls with pals whining about it, and back-and-forth documents—hundreds and hundreds of pages worth—but now, here it is: my green card. In the palm of my hands is proof that I’m a permanent resident.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/a-thousand-days-in-america/">2,392 days ago</a> I moved to America. At the time I thought this was an exciting but short-lived adventure and I never expected to find a stable home here. But, eventually, I did. So: I should celebrate! Well, maybe not? I want to say something along the lines of “and, subsequently, with the green card foretold by the great prophecy in hand, years of anxiety disappeared” but that’s just not true either.</p>
<p>So how do I feel then, huh? <em>Huh?</em> Shouldn’t I be overjoyed? Relieved? Shouldn’t I sleep better with the knowledge that never again can a shitty manager take my job and my home along with it? Shouldn’t I be soothed by this little bit of green plastic knowing that I never have to wait at the airport and hope and pray that I have the right documents, the right key that will let me return home?</p>
<p>I know, I know.</p>
<p>Once this kind of worrying has settled in and taken root then it needs time to dislodge, time to heal over. I should be more patient with myself since it’s hard to put into words how stressful it is that your place in the universe is at the whim of a large and intangible bureaucracy or an employer who you can never fully trust because of the power they wield over you.</p>
<p>I should remember that there’s always going to be stubborn emotions like these that stick around for too long and I shouldn’t bully myself for feeling a certain way about things. This moment requires patience and holding this card tightly in my grubby hands and feeling all these feelings until they go away.</p>
<p>I hope.</p>
Moving is not failure2022-11-22T16:48:38Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/moving-is-not-failure/<p>We’re up earlier than usual, watching the sunrise, and our home is almost empty. The morning is crisp and pink, the soft blues of the sky are losing the fight up there between the intergalactic purples and oranges engaged in mortal combat. Down here though, things are just as chaotic. We’ve torn up the rugs and pulled off the mirrors. Everything is in boxes now and we’re in the process of slowly, stressfully, moving them into our new place.</p>
<p>In just a moment, light will stream in through the kitchen and we know precisely how the sunrise will trace itself across the valley outside. Back in my office, with a cup of coffee in hand, we see the bare walls, the empty space where the font posters once stood. The books are gone, too. Now all that’s left is a desk and, <em>man</em>, I wrote like hell in this little room. I got stressed out all the time and sat on my couch, I paced around wondering how I was gonna design this one little thing, and I made weirdo websites in between breaks of stopping to look up at the houses perched on the hill on the other side of our apartment.</p>
<p>The cat trees and cat caves and little hiding places—for the seal-like Luna and the goblin-like Mia—have been moved to the new place already. In this apartment though the girls will never run along the corridors in the mornings again. Luna will never lead us into the kitchen and over to the snack drawer, meowing silently, and Mia will never get stuck behind the fridge again.</p>
<p>This place was <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/old-place-new-place-reef/">our first reef</a>. We got new jobs, we cried in bed, we hiked up the hill and all over this neighborhood, we gossiped in the kitchen, we walked the dog around the block and picked the boy up when he refused to climb the stairs. We laughed until it hurt and we waited for my green card here.</p>
<p>“Moving always feels like failure,” a friend told me a few days ago. And it’s true. You can’t help but feel that this place was your place, the only place you could ever be. It’s as if you’re throwing away all this...<em>something</em>...only to replace it with something else that might not be as special. Something that might not be yours. It feels disrespectful to all those memories of sunsets and sunrises and giggles in the hallway. Moving into a new place feels like cheating.</p>
<p>But the more we pack, the less attached we are. We slowly realize that this home wasn’t important because of the valley outside, or the way that light trickled in, or the kind neighbors who held our packages for us. It wasn’t important because of the big windows or the long hallway or the snugness of my office in winter. It was only important because we were briefly here. And now we’ll make somewhere else important; we’ll build it up, move in all our stuff, and over time I’m sure that we’ll make it just as snug, just as important as this place was. We’ll take our giggles and tears and even brighter sunsets too and we’ll move them into another corner of San Francisco that we can call our own.</p>
<p>And then, I’m certain, it won’t feel like failure.</p>
Aegir2022-11-17T04:39:58Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/aegir/<p><a href="https://aegir.org/">Aegir’s website</a> is extremely, impossibly, fantastically good. He only updates it once a week or so but when he does it’s fantastic: each blog post is a custom-designed card like <a href="https://aegir.org/words/five-moons">Five Moons</a> or <a href="https://aegir.org/words/four-quarter-moons">Four Quarter Moons</a> or <a href="https://aegir.org/words/the-yellow-season">The Yellow Season</a> or <a href="https://aegir.org/words/still-harvesting">Still Harvesting</a>. Each of them feels like what Robin was dreaming up with <a href="https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/specifying-spring-83/">his protocol</a> and a comic-book-like, Tumblr-esque, indie-web thing.</p>
<p>If these little cards could be shared around and seen together, if these cards could be made together colaboratively, then I think that would be something really exciting, too.</p>
The Art of Passive Aggressive Copywriting2022-11-11T05:27:57Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-art-of-passive-aggressive-copywriting/<p>I wrote about how we’re trying to be <a href="https://sentry.design/blog/passive-aggressive-copy">more playful with copywriting</a> at Sentry and what other websites get wrong:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Every website, to my ear, sounds as if it’s written by the same maniacally happy person sat at their keyboard typing. But I get why. Companies want to sound alert, inspiring, delighted to meet your acquaintance yet because this writing style is now so common, it has the same effect as using the popular, boring ol’ typefaces over and over again: something special is lost in the repetitiveness of it all. Just open up any app on your phone and it’s guaranteed to be too bland to remember, the writing equivalent of when every website was using Helvetica or Georgia. Everything is a little too pleasant, a little too nice, that I personally find kinda creepy.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The solution? Being a jerk!</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I want interfaces to treat us like people, not overly-positive automatons that have to hear songs and watch confetti rain from the sky at every step of a checkout flow. Sometimes it’s okay to be a bit rude and weird for fun.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Also check out that <a href="https://sentry.design/blog/passive-aggressive-copy">lil animated pencil</a> that Chris Jennings made for the post. Not only is Chris the best manager I’ve ever had, he’s also a fantastic animator and designer, too.</p>
<p>I gotta spend some time and play around with 3D one day...</p>
The Timeline is the Problem2022-11-06T16:43:29Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-timeline-is-the-problem-/<p>Sloan, in a post about his <a href="https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/specifying-spring-83/#summer">Spring ‘83 protocol/social network experiment</a>, noted how it feels to be on the web right now:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You feel it, don’t you? They’re all crumbling, the platforms of the last decade. It’s unsettling, but/and also undeniably exciting. Tall trees fall in the forest, and light streams in, nourishing places it hasn’t reached in ages.</p>
<p>But we, as users of the global internet, cannot just ride the same rollercoaster again. It’s too embarrassing to be trapped inside these hungry corporate gambits, these dumb proper nouns. The nouns and verbs of our online relationships should be lowercase, the way “magazine” is lowercase, the way “movie” is lowercase. Anybody can make a movie. Anybody can try.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is exciting! We should not see the web as “complete”! But also I am a tiny bit sad!</p>
<p>I left Twitter the other day, this time for good and it was a simple enough decision: <em>this party sucks and it’s sucked for a while, let’s get outta here.</em> But the party gave me everything! My first writing gig, my friends, my first real gig, my home here in SF. Maybe I’m giving too much credit to the platform (where I should be giving credit to the people on that platform), and maybe I’m seeing it all through blue-rose-tinted glasses, but that lil community of folks changed everything for me.</p>
<p>I wrote something the other day for <a href="https://hownottomakeabook.com/">the book</a> that applies to both fonts and this fresh potential for a better web/platform/protocol that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...you can’t help but get this odd, excitable feeling now: the feeling of adventure, of punk rock graphic design, of frontiers yet seen.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I should keep that in mind that although it might be sad that we’ve lost this platform to pure goonery, there is this potential for a new protocol, a new platform, a whole new thing. But—caution!—Sloan reminds us to be careful with this line of thinking:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[...] The opportunity before us, as investigators and experimenters in the 2020s, isn’t to make Twitter or Tumblr or Instagram again, just “in a better way” this time. Repeating myself from above: a decentralized or federated timeline is still a timeline, and for me, the timeline is the problem.</p>
</blockquote>
Food and Sleep: III2022-11-01T08:22:29Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/food-and-sleep:-iii/<p>At the beginning of the pandemic I snapped into shape. I had just been fired and dumped, my visa on the verge of expiring. All things looked down and to the right. One day, in an effort to stop feeling sorry for myself, I dragged an exercise bike into the empty bedroom of my ex-roommate. It was here that I kicked my ass every day for 8 months until I lost 70 pounds by the end of it. It felt great, and I felt invincible.</p>
<p>“Fuck the pandemic,” I thought. “Just look how jacked I am!”</p>
<p>I let go of the discipline eventually, once I moved into a much smaller apartment before the 2020 election. For some reason working out and kicking my ass every day no longer felt punk rock. Now it felt sad, and the isolation kicked in again: my people had left the city, and other friendships were deteriorating at a rapid pace. With no family or friends or partner close by it was extremely hard to keep moving, to keep writing, to pretend that I was okay.</p>
<p>(We were all not okay.)</p>
<p>Then I didn’t sleep for a week or two before the vote. Days of panic ensued. Insomnia and anxiety twisted themselves together in that tiny studio apartment of mine until one mid-morning I heard someone cry “MY GOD!” outside. People were confused and didn’t know how to express their relief. The vote had just come in and Biden had won: some began clapping, others started hugging their friends and random strangers cheered with each other. Celebrations broke out just on the other side of my goth-apartment-cum-isolation-chamber but I was still curled up in bed delirious from panic. After years of anxiety it didn’t feel safe yet, it didn’t feel like the right time to celebrate. It was a warm morning, the golden California light illuminated everything in my room that whole day. But it wasn’t safe outside, although now it was safer and that alone was worthy of celebration. Whilst folks still cheered and hugged themselves silly, I cried my guts out for an hour and then immediately fell into the deepest sleep all afternoon and all evening and it was the most I’ve ever rested in my life.</p>
<p>Now I’m facing something not entirely similar but the impact is the same. No sleep, again. Bad diet, again. The small things are hard for some reason, too. Taking care of myself requires enormous amounts of effort. Being kind and helpful to others feels somewhat impossible. Friendships have likewise deteriorated, perhaps beyond repair. What’s happening to me?</p>
<p>I’m not sure, it always takes an age to get out of these personal recessions and I never really understand how they start or how they stop. It’s so weird too because things are so much better for me personally and professionally now.</p>
<p>And yet...and yet...</p>
Music for a Plague2022-10-30T17:16:23Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/music-for-a-plague/<p>In a dazed fury the other day I saw that <em>A Plague Tale: Requiem</em> came out and so many folks were saying so many good things about it that I decided to pick up the first game in the series called <em>A Plague Tale: Innocence</em> and see what the fuss was all about.</p>
<p>I was cynically expecting an indie hit with a half-baked story about a big sister and her younger brother with very annoying controls. But I am an idiot! My opinions are mostly wrong! Happily, I’m embarrassed to admit that I have never been so wrong about a game before: <em>Innocence</em> is a slow, spiraling descent into madness and I loved every moment of it.</p>
<p>The music though! Of all the jigsaw pieces that went into making this fabulous game, the music is what elevates it into something else entirely. This might also stand out because I had just embarrassingly finished <em>Modern Warfare II</em> which barely has any music in it at all. Throughout the whole game you’re in these big firefights with nothing in the soundtrack to indicate how you should feel. Am I at the end of a mission? Is this the beginning of a stressful scene? Is this bad guy the <em>real</em> bad guy? Give me feelings! Give me songs!</p>
<p>With <em>Innocence</em> that’s always clear: the music drags you towards one emotion or the other and by just listening to the soundtrack you can tell what you’re supposed to feel at any given moment in the story. It’s almost as if the game was written for the soundtrack alone: the music is inspired by the game’s time period, set in 14th century France during the Hundred Years’ War. There are soft mandolin stringed instruments that a court jester might play with a wink and then, when the crazy shit kicks off, everything descends into a pounding orchestral screaming. In songs like <a href="https://music.apple.com/us/album/inquisition/1463873560?i=1463873569">Inquisition</a>, the music is a swarming tempest of anxiety but then you rush towards safety, things calm down, you hold your brother’s hand. A sweet thing like <a href="https://music.apple.com/us/album/big-sister/1463873560?i=1463873574">Big Sister</a> will play in the background, reminding you that you’re now happy and warm. A moment passes in a dark corridor or in an open field at night and the screeching violins of <a href="https://music.apple.com/us/album/the-killing/1463873560?i=1463873575">The Killing</a> rush towards you. Something terrible this way comes.</p>
<p>All this reminds me that 90% of any story is explained by the soundtrack. And <em>Innocence</em> might not have the best story ever told but, accompanied with the best soundtrack ever put in in a video game, and you have a story that is now foreboding, nightmarish, unforgettable.</p>
Strategic and necessary2022-10-22T19:07:58Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/strategic-and-necessary/<p>I finally watched <em>Everything Everywhere All At Once</em> last night and I have never cry/laughed as much as that before. But there was a line in the movie that struck me:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When I choose to see the good side of things, I’m not being naive. It is strategic and necessary.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That reminded me of a question that Rutger Bregman asks in his book <em>Humankind</em> that still haunts me months after reading it: what if we got the theory of human evolution all wrong? What if it wasn’t the survival of the fittest that made us into who we are and what if our intelligence wasn’t what helped us survive?</p>
<p>There’s an interesting tale in the book about the source of animal and human intelligence where studies have shown that when animals are domesticated they not only get fuzzier—think wild pig’s tails curling over generations or wolf hair fluffing up as they Poké-evolve into dogs—but when you select kindness in animal breeding, there’s another side affect: animals also become more intelligent.</p>
<p>This implies that intelligence is a side-effect of kindness and not the other way round! If that’s true, then our smarts isn’t why we’re successful and intelligence is simply a biological afterthought.</p>
<p>I have read zero studies about this but, generally, from my limited experience, most folks tend to believe that they’re successful because they’re smart. They know how to wield financial markets in the same way that our ancestors knew how to wield fire and feather arrows. Likewise, every discussion about the early history of humans brags about how smart we are, how we tamed the wilderness with our super macho brains, but that always implies that the kindness of a community is just a thing that happens. It’s not as important as our genius, world-building smartness.</p>
<p>But that’s all wrong, Rutger argues convincingly. Instead, and from evolution’s point of view, kindness is strategic and necessary.</p>
Fake Work2022-10-22T18:48:54Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/fake-work-/<p>I really like what <a href="https://email-is-good.com/2022/10/17/0-unread-emails/">Chris says here about email</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I do think it’s OK to kinda poke through your inbox sometimes just to remind your brain about things in there you might need to get to. But just marking your messages as read is essentially fake work. Be wary of fake work.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>Be wary of fake work</em>! Heck yes.</p>
<p>There’s two parts of this for me. First, we often want to <em>feel</em> productive without actually being productive. Clicking “read” on emails is not work though. Archiving, deleting, replying—that’s the work. Yet sometimes it’s really hard to know what we’ll actually do later versus what we hope we’ll do in the future. Second, machines should do most of this work for us.</p>
<p>I’ve been thinking about inboxes a lot over the last year (because at Sentry that’s effectively what I’m doing every day) but what makes the great ones great is that they encourage you to do <em>real</em> work: they automate as much as possible so that you don’t even see all the toil bullshit that the machine has done for you.</p>
<p>A lot of inbox-esque interfaces (not just email) put the burden of this kind of work onto the user—triaging endless useless lists of content—but we can do better. Every to-do item should be important and every click should be useful.</p>
Monarch2022-10-17T23:47:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/monarch/<p>Somewhere in this sea of mustaches is my great grandfather on my mom’s side, William French. He could be any one of these faces; there’s no blondish hair, big-ish noses, or any other genetic quirk of chance that’s familiar to me. All these men look the same, and I could be related to each and every one of them.</p>
<p>My great grandfather is in here somewhere though, I know it.</p>
<figure class="about-img no-margin">
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/monarch-1.png" alt="A black and white picture of seventy captains in the British army sitting for a photograph in India, 1934" /></p>
</figure>
<p>I’ve always walked by this picture, framed proudly in my parents’ kitchen and there was always a dose of pride in it for me: <em>look, my family is a part of history</em>! But the more I look at this photograph the more it haunts me. At the very top of the picture, a caption notes that these men were all officers and, at the bottom, another note reads:</p>
<p><em>Rawalpindi, India, October 1934.</em></p>
<p>This is no vacation then, no ordinary picture of my great grandfather in a military outfit. This a snapshot of seventy men in the British Empire, sitting for a photograph in what is now modern-day Pakistan.</p>
<p>So when you realize <em>where</em> this picture was taken, everything about it changes: why are these men in India?</p>
<p>If you ask any British person why these chaps were sitting for a photograph five thousand five hundred miles from home then I don’t think they’d be able to tell you why. A few months ago I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. Is this something to do with World War I? World War II? Maybe the British just had a military base out there or something? Wasn’t this back when we were the good guys defending the world from fascism?</p>
<p>After listening to <em><a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/empire/id1639561921">Empire</a></em> and reading Shashi Tharoor’s excellent <em>Inglorious Empire</em>, I now know why: William French is sitting for this photograph in 1934 because a corporation once stole a country. One hundred and seventy seven years before my great grandfather set foot in this foreign country, the East India Company seized the region’s treasures, pillaging its industry, and entirely broke the economy. Refusing to govern the people they now controlled, the Company caused famines and set people against each other for their own political benefit without a care for ruling India or its people. All they cared for was the plunder and the profit.</p>
<p>Tharoor writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...kingdom after kingdom was annexed by the simple expedient of offering its ruler a choice between annihilation in war and a comfortable life in subjugation. When war was waged, the costs were paid by taxes and tributes exacted from Indians. Indians paid, in other words, for the privelege of being conquered by the British.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>Looting</em> is a better word than taxation perhaps (the word “loot” was taken from India, too). And so for a hundred years the East India Company crushed the country to bits, exploiting everyone they could. Eventually, the company was gobbled up—nationalized—by the British monarchy. And with it, Queen Victoria became Empress of India: the British Raj was born.</p>
<p>Not once at school was I told any of this stuff. I’d heard of the Raj before, although the British always spoke of it as if it was something to be proud of. I never knew what it really was until Tharoor firmly slapped the ignorance out of me.</p>
<p>So that’s why my great grandfather is sat for his photograph in Rawalpindi. He’s a line in the thread connecting the immense corporate greed of the East India Company—from pirates and thieves and delusional monarchs with visions of empire—to then him, my great grandfather, sat there in the sun.</p>
<p>Wherever he is.</p>
<figure class="about-img no-margin">
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/monarch-1.png" alt="A black and white picture of seventy captains in the British army sitting for a photograph in India, 1934" /></p>
</figure>
<p>Doesn’t this photograph mean something else now? I can’t look at it like a cute little trinket hanging on the kitchen wall.</p>
<p>What this photograph shows instead is William French, the company man. He wasn’t some random guy in the background of the empire—a casual onlooker—but an officer in it, an enforcer of the British Raj. There aren’t any family stories about his time as an officer or what he saw there, but a quick search about what the British did in Rawalpindi around that time and I find myself reading about mustard gas experiments inflicted on <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/sep/01/india.military">Indian soldiers who were used as test subjects</a>.</p>
<p>Was my great grandfather a part of this? Did he know? Perhaps he knew of things much worse. Perhaps he <em>did</em> much worse.</p>
<p>As William French sat to take this picture in Rawalpindi, George Orwell published his first novel about what the British had done to Burma. And it’s obvious to me in all of Orwell’s writing, in <em>Nineteen Eighty Four</em> or <em>Animal Farm</em> or <em>Burmese Days</em>, that he wasn’t just writing about communism or fascism taking over the world—he was writing about us, the British.</p>
<p>(The scary part about fascism isn’t that someone else can be lured into it, but that even <em>you</em> can, too.)</p>
<p>At the time Orwell was describing his life as a police officer in Burma—and what the empire turned him into—he was also writing about William French, about my great grandfather; a man on the other side of the world contributing to the same empire in his own way. Although perhaps French didn’t do anything evil, perhaps he wasn’t a company man at heart. Perhaps he was drawn into this empire and he couldn’t say a word about it. But it doesn’t matter what he thought, it only matters what he did: French went to a foreign country, donned the uniform, and became a component of this colonial empire. If he lasted until retirement then the Indian government would have paid for his pension: even if he left the country his extraction, his pillaging, his looting would continue.</p>
<p>So the reason why I’m staring at this photograph is because here it is, here’s my link to colonialism, my link in the great chain of monarchy and empire, a document that proves my family’s contribution to the plunder.</p>
The Right Kind of Attention2022-10-15T16:34:55Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-right-kind-of-attention/<p>106,820 people visited my website last week. Two posts had been upvoted to the top of the orange website and a hellish amount of attention was suddenly thrown my way.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/analytics-sadness.png" alt="A screenshot of the number pageviews of this here humble website last week" /></p>
<p>This has happened before and I’ve always felt conflicted about it. The first time I got onto the front page of the orange website I was like <em>finally my time has come! I shall ascend to Valhalla! Mom, mom, take a look—my genius is about to be recognized!</em> But what I didn’t understand back then as a writer desperate for eyeballs is that you need to be careful about all this and find the right kind of attention: optimizing for eye balls is almost always bad for you. And so the orange website always has been, and always will be, the wrong kind of attention for me.</p>
<p>Most writers would kill for this many eyeballs though. <em>Look at all this engagement! I have never felt more engaged!</em> But now, if I could go back and give my teenage self some advice, then I would shake them silly and shout about how they need to invest in smaller communities and ignore the likes and retweets and eyeballs as much as they can.</p>
<p>On a similar note, I genuinely admire how <a href="https://macwright.com/2022/09/15/hacker-news.html">Tom MacWright</a> feels the same way about this stuff. Except he takes it one step further by adding these lines of JavaScript to his website:</p>
<pre class="language-javascript"><code class="language-javascript"><span class="token keyword">try</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token keyword">if</span> <span class="token punctuation">(</span>document<span class="token punctuation">.</span>referrer<span class="token punctuation">)</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token keyword">const</span> ref <span class="token operator">=</span> <span class="token keyword">new</span> <span class="token class-name">URL</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>document<span class="token punctuation">.</span>referrer<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token keyword">if</span> <span class="token punctuation">(</span>ref<span class="token punctuation">.</span>host <span class="token operator">===</span> <span class="token string">"news.ycombinator.com"</span><span class="token punctuation">)</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> window<span class="token punctuation">.</span>location<span class="token punctuation">.</span>href <span class="token operator">=</span> <span class="token string">"https://google.com/"</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /> <span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span> <span class="token keyword">catch</span> <span class="token punctuation">(</span>e<span class="token punctuation">)</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>These humble lines of JavaScript will redirect folks away from your blog when they click a link on the orange website. Tom writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Redirecting Hacker News links away from this website makes sense to me. Traffic to this website doesn’t pay my bills. Disengaged readers just looking for a hot take don’t return to my site, or recognize me when I write something else, or write blog posts of their own and bring new creativity to the indie web.</p>
<p>Maybe posts will be less viral (I can hear, as I write that, someone writing “you haven’t written a hit in years, Tom!”), but writing viral posts or maximizing hits wasn’t my goal when I set out and it isn’t now.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As I dove into the comments of the two posts that shot up last week, I started to think about what kind of audience this is and how I don’t want any of this; the passive aggressiveness, the snark. But, most important of all, I don’t want this kind of relationship with the people who read my work.</p>
<p>Because attention alone is not enough.</p>
Take a Break You Idiot2022-10-09T00:12:33Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/take-a-break-you-idiot/<p>After long bouts of work—months and months uninterrupted—I become a slug person; small hurdles spike my anxiety, my anger flares at the slightest confrontation, I notice fewer jokes, fewer attempts on my part to make people laugh. My memory goes to all hell too and I can’t seem to concentrate on prolonged amounts of anything. Books fall off my radar, I stop listening to music. My phone is in my hand at all times, scrolly-anxiety-inducing apps become impossible to avoid.</p>
<p>I know the cure: work less! Take a break! Stop doing things and do even fewer things than you think you ought to! Take a week! Take two! Stop all forms of work, go exercise and write, go learn how to do something entirely else. But each time I forget my own advice until I’m at this point, where I am now: basically useless.</p>
<p>I watch other folks take periodic and consistent periods of time off so that they don’t explode but I always push myself to the very brink. Suddenly, out of nowhere, I’ll almost start crying in the afternoon or stay up until the middle of the night thinking about something dumb I said. Maybe that one thing upset that guy and soon you’ll have to—ughhhhhh!</p>
<p>I need to hit the emergency break.</p>
<p>But, after that, I need to stop this. I have to start taking consistent pauses, book my time off way in advance. I always feel guilty taking any time off whatsoever but I’m not that important! Things will happen without me! That is okay! Aggggh!</p>
Prototyping, prototyping, prototyping2022-10-02T15:34:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/prototyping,-prototyping,-prototyping/<p><a href="https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2022/moving-with-prototypes/">Jim Nielsen</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Prototyping <em>is</em> moving. It’s the meeting, the considering, and the conceptualizing, but with iterative progress in a concrete artifact. When you’re done, you’re left with something tangible — as well as experiential knowledge — rather than just a bunch of meeting notes and perceived agreement.</p>
<p>As an industry, we love to talk about “shipping” because it’s moving. “Just ship it and learn.” I submit to you that prototyping is shipping, just earlier and to a smaller group than the conventional understanding of “shipping” suggests. Ship early and often? I say prototype early and often. Somewhere along the spectrum of fidelity (unique to you and your context) prototyping naturally turns into “shipping”.</p>
</blockquote>
The Other Internet2022-09-28T15:53:36Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-other-internet/<p>In <a href="https://youtu.be/biYciU1uiUw">this fantastic video</a>, Dan Olson looks at the grossest parts of the publishing industry; the exploitation, the predatory behavior, the high tolerance of spam by publishing companies, and how grifters push freelance writers and voice actors into a gig economy nightmare.</p>
<p>Dan breaks down how these scams work—how they exploit people—but he goes one step further. He gets his hands dirty, and tries to keep pace with the ghost writers that are caught up in these scams by writing 1000 words a day, every day, for a whole month. He documents his experience to show precisely how these ghost writers are getting shafted and what kind of writing becomes of it.</p>
<p>Shocker! This whole system turns out to be a Jenga of grifts; one grift stacked on top of another, all the way down. It’s horrifying to me that there’s folks out there who spend their days trying to wrangle a quick buck out of the web like this and even more so that they’re joyfully exploiting freelancers like Dan describes.</p>
<p>When I first looked at the internet as a kid, I only saw this side of the web, and even then I thought it was all garbage. I could see how my family was using the internet as a grift, too. And outside of my family there seemed to be nothing on the web besides scams—I believed that the World Wide Web itself was a con. It was all advertising, spreadsheets full of stolen emails, spam, and viruses.</p>
<p>At thirteen I saw the internet as a human meat grinder of exploitation and I didn’t want any part of it. But videogames and books? They were free from the grift! I didn’t have the words to describe it then but I knew in my bones that Animorphs and Final Fantasy weren’t trying to steal my email address or credit card, they were trying to <em>build</em> something. They were clean, morally superior even, compared to this web of lies and deceit and desperation that I saw on the internet.</p>
<p>It wasn’t until my early twenties that it clicked for me: the web doesn’t have to be like this! You don’t have to participate in the con! You can make websites that are joyous and funny and charming, websites that don’t contribute to the meat grinder. You don’t have to steal anyone’s email address or exploit and coerce folks into giving you money. The world wide web could be—if we imagined it correctly—more than money.</p>
<p>Above it, somehow.</p>
<p>Whenever I tell civilians that I’m a web designer I get the sense that they place me in that other category, that other internet I noticed as a kid. I can see it in their eyes: <em>Ah, so you’re one of those spammers, huh?</em> And I want to shout NO! I am on the side of Neopets forums and Geocities and uploading mp3s of shitty songs onto your <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IWeb">iWeb</a> website. I’m on the side of blogging and learning about ARIA roles and finding a small circle of nerds that you care about but you don’t know their full names. I’m a part of this other other Internet, where hustle isn’t about making a quick buck and stealing from people but building something new and exciting from your bedroom.</p>
<p>I feel such rage and animosity towards these people who con and cheat and steal. They look at this incredible thing we’ve built together—a world tethered by <abbr title="HyperText Markup Language">HTML</abbr>—and see it as yet another tool for exploiting people.</p>
<p>And so, for the record, if I may, disrespectfully, unkindly, repeat myself once more: fuck this con, fuck this exploitation and lazy hustle, and fuck this enormous Jenga of grifts.</p>
The Food Issue2022-09-26T15:05:36Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-food-issue/<p>Type specimens are getting buck wild these days. Here’s <em><a href="https://foodissue.commercialtype.com/">The Food Issue</a></em>, a website by Commercial Type, that’s a tiny magazine and type specimen. But, also: Helena Fitzgerald! Helen Rosner! Robin Sloan!</p>
<p>What a great idea for a thing.</p>
<p>Editor of <em>The Food Issue</em>, Caren Litherland, wrote about the origins and where this punk-rock idea comes from:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The catalyst for the present specimen was a volume published in 1958: <em>Linotype-Schriftenreigen</em>, a title one might loosely translate as <em>A Roundelay of Linotype Typefaces</em>. It’s a diminutive hardcover that fits comfortably in the hand and shows all of German Linotype’s text faces in roughly equivalent settings as text for books.</p>
<p>[Schwartz and Barnes of Commercial Type] envisioned a type specimen that, like Linotype-Schriftenreigen, would sit comfortably in readers’ hands. It would be disguised as a single-issue magazine that would show Commercial Type’s text faces at work — a specimen meant to be looked at and read. They decided to commission original writing for it and to encourage readers to choose different typeface combinations for the various texts. When they asked me if I would edit this hypothetical magazine, I enthusiastically said yes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I have never heard of the <em>Linotype-Schriftenreigen</em> and must find myself a copy. How dare it exist without me knowing about it!</p>
Take Care of Your Blog2022-09-11T17:25:14Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/take-care-of-your-blog-/<p>Someone asked me for advice about their career a while ago and even though I absolutely do not feel qualified enough to give advice to anyone about this, here goes nothin’:</p>
<p>Blog!</p>
<p>Blog your heart out! Blog about something you’ve learned, blog about something you’re interested in. Blog about cameras or HTML or that one browser bug you’ve noticed this morning or blog about the sky above you right this very second. How many clouds are up there? Blog about your annoying kids and your fucked up relationship and blog about that terrifying time when you went to the beach with some people you weren’t really friends with and you got drunk and then it got real dark and you didn’t have a tent so you slept on a sand dune all night long.</p>
<p>I say again to ye: just blog!</p>
<p>Ignore the analytics and the retweets though. There will be lonely, barren years of no one looking at your work. There will be blog posts that you adore that no one reads and there’ll be blog posts you spit out in ten minutes that take the internet by storm. How do you get started though? Well, screw the research! A blog post can anything, a half-thought like this one or a grandiose essay with a million footnotes. It can look like anything, too: you can have a simple HTML-only website or you can spend a month on the typography, getting every letter-spaced part of it <em>just</em> right.</p>
<p>There are no rules to blogging except this one: always self-host your website because your URL, your own private domain, is the most valuable thing you can own. Your career will thank you for it later and no-one can take it away. But don’t wait up for success to come, it’s going to be a slog—there will be years before you see any benefit. But slowly, with enough momentum behind it, your blog will show you the world: there will be distant new friends, new enemies, whole continents might open up and welcome themselves to you.</p>
<p>Or maybe they won’t. But you’ll never know unless you write that half-assed thing that’s in your head right now. You know the one I’m talking about, that thing you just ranted to your friend or your partner about. That level that annoys you in Elden Ring or that beautiful picture you just saw or that Tik Tok that you have extremely big opinions about. Everything is worthy of your blog. Everything.</p>
<p>So, if you want to push your career and your life in a new direction then take care of your blog. Because it all adds up.</p>
The Tale of the Third Finger Scan2022-09-10T16:28:15Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-tale-of-the-third-finger-scan/<p>I am burrowed in a small cafe with soft music in the background and a warm coffee in hand. The heatwave in the bay area has broken and today I have nothing to do but read and write and read some more.</p>
<p>I ought to to update the <a href="https://robinrendle.com/newsletter">/newsletter</a> page today since now I’m working on multiple newsletters at once. Also it would be a good time to improve the <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes">/notes</a> page and break it up by categories or tags or something.</p>
<p>The only bummer thing on the agenda today is gathering documents for my green card application. It’s half anxiety-inducing and half cringe. You’re asked to provide a mountain of evidence of all your contributions to society and then beg for gushing recommendation letters from folks you admire. Finally you have to wait for some almighty figure in some distant, unknown place to say “Ah, yes. You are worthy…for now.”</p>
<p>Several weeks ago I had to go and get two fingers scanned in a big machine. Then a few weeks after that I had to go back to the same big machine and get one more finger scanned. It’s too kind to call it Kafka-esque, as you’re forced to pretend that any of this bureaucracy works or is useful or has the impact that it claims to have. It’s a clown show that impacts millions of people, solely designed to flatter the egos of those who already live here—do you see how hard it is to get into this club??? I must be special! And I am sat here venting my frustration despite this whole system being designed to benefit me—white, British, employed.</p>
<p>It’s in these moments when you’re in a booth getting your third finger scanned or sat waiting in a nondescript building awaiting another strange interview, that you see America from a different angle. I love this place, it’s my home now, and I feel American in every way that any American must feel. But it’s in these moments that I believe this place can be so much better than a racist, colossal bureaucracy designed just for me.</p>
<p>Okay, enough ranting. Back to the coffee.</p>
How Not To Make A Book2022-09-05T02:52:30Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/how-not-to-make-a-book/<p>I made a lil micro-site for the newsletter I’m kicking off tomorrow morning called <a href="https://hownottomakeabook.com/">How Not To Make A Book</a>. Here is me quoting me:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There’s almost too much to care for; the design, paper stock, binding, proofreading, logistics, then—not to forget and most important of all—the words you need to write inside. But what does that process look like? And how do you publish an independent book in 2022?</p>
<p>Let’s find out.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m hoping to write this newsletter alongside the book and document every bit of drama along the way. Tomorrow I’ll be making the first post so sign up now to get early access to whatever this book might turn into.</p>
<p>Exciting stuff.</p>
TKTKTK2022-09-04T00:12:31Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/tktktk/<p>Back in 2009, Cory Doctorow described how to <a href="http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2009/01/cory-doctorow-writing-in-age-of.html">write like the wind</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Researching isn't writing and vice-versa. When you come to a factual matter that you could google in a matter of seconds, don't. Don't give in and look up the length of the Brooklyn Bridge, the population of Rhode Island, or the distance to the Sun. That way lies distraction — an endless click-trance that will turn your 20 minutes of composing into a half-day's idyll through the web. Instead, do what journalists do: type "TK" where your fact should go, as in "The Brooklyn bridge, all TK feet of it, sailed into the air like a kite." "TK" appears in very few English words (the one I get tripped up on is "Atkins") so a quick search through your document for "TK" will tell you whether you have any fact-checking to do afterwards. And your editor and copyeditor will recognize it if you miss it and bring it to your attention.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I have no idea where I learned this but it works extremely well for me. Often I’ll half quote something I remember like “Thoughts whither have ye TKTKTK” and I’ll often do this for someone’s last name (Jane TKTKTK) or the title of a post (An Ode to TKTKTK).</p>
<p>It keeps the momentum up when you need it the most, when the page is the emptiest and requires the most acceleration to get off the ground.</p>
Magnet2022-09-03T23:21:48Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/magnet/<p>My favorite typeface right now is <a href="https://frerejones.com/families/magnet">Magnet</a> by <a href="https://www.ingaploennigs.com/">Inga Plönnigs</a>. I’ve been working on a side project for the last couple of weeks that I’ll be sharing with y’all this weekend and Magnet has been by my side the whole time, making me look much smarter than I really am.</p>
<p>The most distinctive feature of Magnet is how it has these big chunks sliced out of the letters, making them look almost italicized, as Inga explains in her <a href="https://frerejones.com/blog/opposites-attract">design notes</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Magnets in the real world will exert their force whether they’re shaped as bars, discs, horseshoes or anything else. After sketching and experimenting and revising, the Magnet typeface ended with two distinct shapes, ready to push and pull in their own way.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/notch-angles4.webp" alt="A diagram of the typeface Magnet, showing chunks carved out of the letters at a slant" /></p>
<p>If you’re not sold yet then <a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/frere-jones-web/font/families/specimen_documents/000/000/012/original/FrereJonesType_Magnet.pdf?1611856321">Magnet’s type specimen</a> is worth every second of your time. In the text version, a great many of these letters look as if they’re showing off for no good reason at all, like the lowercase g with its tiny uptick:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/magnet-close-up.png" alt="A zoomed in version of Magnet Text" /></p>
<p>So neat!</p>
I Don’t Believe in Sprints2022-09-02T16:51:30Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/i-don%E2%80%99t-believe-in-sprints/<p>Sprints and backlogs and pointing tickets—the nigh-on universal method for making software today—is stupid. All this junk around the work makes software slower and more difficult to build. It’s form-filling monkey work and the only way we can improve the quality of software is to throw all those best practices away.</p>
<p>(Hot take alert!)</p>
<p>Sprints don’t help organize things, they’re not a useful organizing tool, and if we were all honest with each other then we’d admit they’re designed for managers who don’t trust their employees (if your manager needs to look at Jira to figure out what work you’ve done for your review or what’s shipped lately then they’re not paying enough attention to the team).</p>
<p>Likewise, I’ve never seen a good team improved by sprints and I’ve never seen a crappy team improved by them either (side note: there are no crappy teams, only crappy managers). In fact, every efficient and productive team I’ve worked on has ignored the concept of sprints altogether; people are more focused without them, they communicate better. When you’re on a team like that, then it’s easy to see how everyone else mistakes the bureaucracy around the work for the work itself.</p>
<p>But Jira is not the work. Pointing things for an hour is an hour you’ll never get back. It’s an hour lost, an hour carelessly thrown into the void, an hour that could’ve been spent building the next most important thing.</p>
<p>Good teams don’t need sprints to get good work done. They don’t need to point tickets or file receipts away once something is complete. This always leads to an endless backlog of crap anyway which is also a waste of time since they too only serve managers who are scared to say “ah yes, we have listened to this complaint and we believe it’s not important.” That’s what a backlog is; a list of useless tasks that makes people feel better. The next most important thing, the thing right around the corner, is all that matters. And that stuff you’ll remember if you’re paying close attention. Discard everything else. Focus!</p>
<p>So all of this junk—the backlogs, the sprints, the points—is pure bureaucracy. It gets in the way of productive folks, punishing them for the lack of confidence in their leaders.</p>
Comparing Book-Printing Services2022-08-31T01:47:23Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/comparing-book-printing-services/<p>Ages ago, <a href="https://aresluna.org/">Marcin</a> wrote this great piece about <a href="https://mwichary.medium.com/my-experiences-printing-a-small-batch-of-books-c04141b63dfe">printing a small batch of books</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’ve recently found myself wanting to print a small run (15 copies) of a book. I approached this knowing pretty well what I wanted: a simple, old-school book with…letters in it:</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is mostly a note for me soon, but it’s amazing that with just a few clicks you can get a book you wrote printed and sent to your front door. And I’m sure things have changed a lot since Marcin wrote this piece back in 2016, but I’ll be using these notes soon.</p>
<p>Also if you have any recommendations for better book-on-demand services then let me know!</p>
Alphabettes2022-08-24T21:10:07Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/alphabettes-/<p>I don’t think I’ve ever linked to <a href="https://www.alphabettes.org/">Alphabettes</a> before but this blog is thoroughly worth adding to yer RSS feed. I stumbled over the website again today doing some research for a little thing and forgot how joyous it is.</p>
<p>The Alphabettes gang describes their website like this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="http://alphabettes.org/">Alphabettes.org</a> is a showcase for work, commentary, and research on lettering, typography, and type design. Our loose network is here to support and promote the work of all women in our fields. Currently (December 2021), Alphabettes has 250+ members from around the world in various areas and levels of activity.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Just check out <a href="https://www.alphabettes.org/abetki/">this fantastic post</a> about Ukranian calligrapher-designers Victoria and Vitalina Lopukhina. They made these beautiful letters on the iPad running between bomb shelters:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/alphabet.webp" alt="A beautiful drawing of the word "АБЕТКИ"" /></p>
<p>Joyous! Joyous, I say!</p>
MD System2022-08-23T22:20:20Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/md-system/<p>I missed this 2022 update for MD System and <a href="https://system.mass-driver.com/">this particularly lovely specimen website</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>MD System’s standard width is designed for running text and punchy titles alike. Its proportions are geared towards readability and an overall natural balance, rather than the rigid uniformity of many similar grotesque typefaces.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’ve used MD System only once before, in <a href="https://robinrendle.com/essays/dartmoor-death-stranding-and-me/">an old essay</a>, and I loved the absolute heck out of it. I reckon the more condensed variants are my favorite for reasons I can’t explain though.</p>
<p>But this is a heck of a website!</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/md-system.webp" alt="A screenshot from the MD System website" /></p>
<p>This reminds me that type specimen websites are just the best. They’re always so creative and wild and intimidatingly weird.</p>
My home on the web2022-08-23T14:26:08Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/my-home-on-the-web/<p>My relationship with the internet is changing. I don’t really have a home on the web now, a place I can go to log-in, kick back, and doom scroll. That makes me happy for many reasons—yay for no abuse and casual violence!—but also sad for others—the loss of distant friendships! Oh, all the jokes I’ll miss!</p>
<p>Every community on the web that I’ve been a part of has ended up skyrocketing my anxiety eventually and no matter what community or platform that I try—Discord, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc. etc.—it all ends up leading to the same place. Not feeling great. I fall down some rabbit hole or find some horrid group of folks and feel like the place just isn’t for me.</p>
<p>So I’m not sure if there’s a better home besides this one.</p>
<p>Even if it’s just me here.</p>
Work ethics2022-08-23T11:32:39Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/work-ethics/<p>Jeremy wrote a great piece about <a href="https://adactio.com/journal/19392">how we treat our work</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Here’s the thing: there’s good work and there’s working hard. What matters is doing good work. Often, to do good work you need to work hard. And so people naturally conflate the two, thinking that what matters is working hard. But whether you work hard or not isn’t actually what’s important. What’s important is that you do good work.</p>
<p>I wonder how many of us are constructing little monuments in our inboxes and calendars, filling those spaces with work to be done in an attempt to chase the rewards we’ve been told will result from hard graft.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I know someone, a friend of a friend, whose calendar is always jam-packed. Meetings upon meetings, work upon work, and this certain someone brags about all the work that they do on the weekends, too. They see themselves as extremely successful but I don’t! I don’t believe that you need to be frantic and stressed to lead a productive life.</p>
<p>Lately I’ve tried to, as Jeremy writes, focus on the outcomes of great work done more so than the byproducts of busywork.</p>
Close-looking2022-08-21T10:55:34Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/close-looking/<p><a href="https://georgesaunders.substack.com/p/one-city-ten-years?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email">Saunders</a>, of course:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The closer we look at a time and place, the less strange it seems, the more knowable, the more like our own. (And also, of course, the more specifically different from our own.) We learn, or remind ourselves, that we are capable of this sort of deep looking and that with deep looking comes increased feelings of familiarity, comfort, generosity, even love. Close-looking might even, sometimes, serve a protective or cautionary function — learning “how things really, precisely were” might not always be a comfort, but it is, always, good prep for whatever’s coming.</p>
</blockquote>
Snark Pass2022-08-21T09:51:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/snark-pass/<p>My editing process is disorganized. Perhaps the only time when it gets better is when I print things out onto actual paper, sit at my desk, and cross things out. But there’s no process there, no real objective besides finding the really bad stuff and getting it gone.</p>
<p>But—one thing I’ve always done with newsletters is give them what I call a snark pass. After I’ve finished a first draft I skim the text and, ignoring the spelling mistakes or even the subject matter, I just try to focus on removing all the sarcasm and all the snarky, judgmental stuff that sometimes slips in.</p>
<p>Does this sentence really need me to make that off-comment about how something “still holds up” as if I’m the arbiter of all good things? Does this joke punch up or punch down? Is there a way I could rephrase this sentence to be kinder to both sides of the argument, not in a “both sides” sort of way, but is it possible to be less of a jerk when describing a point of view that I disagree with? Can I make this more honest?</p>
<p>A snark pass helps get rid of all that junk that gets in the way of a story well told, stripping it down to the kindest version that a piece can be.</p>
All the things a blog post can be2022-08-21T08:51:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/all-the-things-a-blog-post-can-be/<p>Saccharine, careless, melancholic, naive, questioning, questionable, dashing, daring, and vengeful. Inquisitive. Soaring! Doubtful, distrustful, apprehensive, hesitant, unready, unabridged, undecided, unwavering. Woeful. Well-researched, well-footnoted, easy-going, mild-tempered, soft-spoken, youthful, vigorous. Pretentious, charming, upbeat, offbeat, off-kilter, on-message, downtrodden, grief-stricken, middling, sore and sullen. Embarrassing, exultant, blush-inducing, cringe-inducing, romantic, over-thinking, under-thinking, unstoppable whilst somehow particular, peculiar, promising, pompous, and precise at the same time.</p>
About the Redesign2022-08-20T09:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/about-the-redesign/<p>I’m happy with this here website for the first time in years. There’s still a lot to fix but since <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-smallest-css/">I nuked my website</a> and started from almost-scratch a few months ago, I think this is a good place to stop and look back at what I’ve built so far.</p>
<p>Let’s take a look! First up, the new homepage:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/homepage.webp" alt="A screenshot of the homepage" /></p>
<p>Of everything here I’m most proud of this page, and it went through a bunch of different iterations before settling on this big wall of text. I kicked things off by asking what I can do with variable fonts since I’ve never used them for the site before and I spotted <a href="https://hex.xyz/HEX_Franklin/">HEX Franklin</a> whilst writing <a href="http://localhost:8080/essays/in-praise-of-shadows/"><em>Shadows</em></a>.</p>
<p>In the notes for Hex Franklin it talked about “multiplexed spacing” where “each glyph maintains a consistent width across weights, allowing for weight changes without text reflowing.” I knew with this multiplexed spacing stuff I could change the text on hover without causing annoying layout shifts. What could I do with that? Hmm....</p>
<p>I was also thinking about how a lot of homepages are kinda the same thing over and over again:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>(Emoji) Hi! My name is X and I work at Company B. I have previously worked at Organization C and Generic Tech Thing D.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Many times over the years my website has fallen into this same boring trap but there’s no room for mystery or strangeness or obfuscation! And considering I don’t need to make a single cent here on this website I can do things much more weirdly than I otherwise might. No introduction! No link to the newsletter! Just tiny extracts and quotes from the notes I’ve written lately.</p>
<p>I can definitely do something more visually interesting here though and push things much further typographically: What if I properly justify the text somehow? What if each line in this block were to be styled differently? etc. etc.</p>
<p>But for now, I’m happy with it.</p>
<p>Next up: the about page.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/about.webp" alt="A screenshot of the about page" /></p>
<p>Ugh. About pages are hard. What do people really need to know about me? Does anyone really want to read this stuff? I struggle with that all the time but I think about what I’d like to learn from my favorite web people and then try to jot that down; a simple black and white photograph to make the yellow borders stick out, write a bit about my previous work, describe what the site is. And that’s it.</p>
<p>Okay so maybe I’m not so happy with this page after all?</p>
<p>I guess the reason why it’s so hard to make an about page for me is that the goal is so murky. What do I want folks to get out of this? I guess a photo of me, an email address, and then...what exactly? Ugh.</p>
<p>There was a timeline here but that got scrapped. It was a cheesy breakdown of my life year by year but it felt a little too self important and much too braggy for my liking. So that got cut, but perhaps I’ll return to it eventually.</p>
<p>Onto the notes page!</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/notes.webp" alt="A screenshot of the notes page" /></p>
<p>So this page definitely needs some love. I sort of want this to feel like an archive that allows spelunking, like diving into someone’s favorite music playlists and private files. I want it to feel personal and overwhelming! So searching and tagging and organizing these notes is really important but I just haven’t got round to building that stuff yet. For now this is just a simple reverse-chron list of every note I’ve written but I did manage to go through every note (100s now!) and update the tags for each one.</p>
<p>To the essays page!</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/essays.webp" alt="A screenshot of the essays page" /></p>
<p>So I spent some time tidying this up last night. I love the idea that these essays are small lil books on the web, fancy pamphlets, <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/the-punk-rock-essay-machine/">bootleg .mobi’s</a>. I went through and read all these essays again to see which I should elevate as the official good stuff and I found a lot of them are embarrassing now. Shadows, Newsletters, Systems, and Futures still hold up—although Futures kinda goes off the deep end towards the midway point because I furiously wrote it from a hospital bed in a feverish panic.</p>
<p>The rest of those essays I don’t want to delete though! I still believe that everything I write should stick around in the archives, even if it’s sort of embarrassing. I don’t expect anyone to read them but it’s good to look back on something ten years from now and see (hopefully) a lot of progress in how I think/how I work. So that old junky stuff is more for me than anyone else.</p>
<p>For now this my Horrid Archive of Forbidden Essays.</p>
<p>And that’s it! I feel like I’m in a good place where I just want to build on these foundations. The Newsletters page requires a lot of work and is still unfinished (I’m wondering if I should archive every old newsletter there) and there’s a few typographic crimes that I’m committing on smaller screens. But so far, this all feels right to me.</p>
<p>Or if not right, then in the right direction.</p>
Fairy Tales2022-08-20T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/fairy-tales/<p>Neil Gaiman in <em>Smoke and Mirrors</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>(Fairy tales, as G.K. Chesteron once said, are more than true. Not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be defeated.)</p>
</blockquote>
Olympus2022-08-18T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/olympus/<p>Daniel Temkin’s <a href="https://github.com/rottytooth/Olympus">Olympus</a> sounds punk as hell:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We command machines as if they were are servants, and yet they often do not do what we want. Olympus is a new programming language which better reflects the actual power dynamic of programmer and machine.</p>
<p>An invocation can ask for more than one command, but the right amount of adoration is required. A heavier ask requires more adoration, and some gods need more than others. Adoration comes in the form of epithets, phrases that celebrate that god such as "goddess who grants the gift of abundance" for Demeter or "well-honored in Thrace and in Scythia" for Ares.</p>
<p>Do not ask the same god for two things in a row. Do not use the same epithets in a rote, repetitive way, and do not let any one god carry too much of the burden, else they may lose patience with you.</p>
</blockquote>
Media Query Ranges2022-08-13T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/media-query-ranges/<p>I was trawling through the interweb the other night and I saw someone mention “ranged media queries.” My immediate thought was how dare anyone ship ranged media queries without consulting me and then my second thought was what the heck is that?</p>
<p>Bramus has, of course, written an excellent piece already describing <a href="https://www.bram.us/2021/10/26/media-queries-level-4-media-query-range-contexts/">what media query ranges are</a> but effectively they’re a kind of shorthand.</p>
<p>So here’s an example of what we’d write today:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token atrule"><span class="token rule">@media</span> <span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token property">min-width</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 700px<span class="token punctuation">)</span></span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token selector">div</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">background</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> red<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>When the browser window is larger than 700px the <code>div</code> will have a red background. Simple enough. But this is where ranged media queries come in:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token atrule"><span class="token rule">@media</span> <span class="token punctuation">(</span>width => 700px<span class="token punctuation">)</span></span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token selector">div</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">background</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> red<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>How strange! Soon we’ll be able to use mathematical operators to set the conditions which is a tiny bit nicer but it also means you can do something a bit more complicated, just like in Bramus’s example:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token atrule"><span class="token rule">@media</span> <span class="token punctuation">(</span>300px <= width <= 750px<span class="token punctuation">)</span></span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token comment">/* styles go here */</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>What this’ll do is only turn these styles on in the range between 300px and 750px. That’s kinda neat! I’m not sure how often I’d need to do that because I only believe in writing mobile styles first and then adding <code>min-width</code> media queries progressively to support larger screens but this is definitely a nice to have.</p>
<p>What I really want though is to be able to nest media queries because today I have to write this...</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token atrule"><span class="token rule">@media</span> <span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token property">min-width</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 700px<span class="token punctuation">)</span></span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token selector">div</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">background</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> red<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><br /><span class="token atrule"><span class="token rule">@media</span> <span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token property">min-width</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 900px<span class="token punctuation">)</span></span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token selector">div</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">background</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> blue<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>...but what I really want to write is something like what Sass let’s you do, but in native CSS:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">div</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token atrule"><span class="token rule">@media</span> <span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token property">min-width</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 700px<span class="token punctuation">)</span></span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">background</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> red<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /> <span class="token atrule"><span class="token rule">@media</span> <span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token property">min-width</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 900px<span class="token punctuation">)</span></span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">background</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> blue<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>Gah that’s so much nicer to me and I’d take this in a heart beat over all those complicated <a href="https://www.bram.us/2019/03/17/the-future-of-css-nesting-selectors/">CSS nesting selectors</a>, but maybe it’s part of the same spec? I’m not sure. I’ve been a bit out of the loop when it comes to the latest CSS features although this weekend I would have used this a dozen times to help me tidy up this here website.</p>
<p>Either way, I’m excited about these small but significant changes to the CSS language.</p>
TypeMedia 20212022-08-06T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/typemedia-2021/<p><a href="https://typemedia.org/">TypeMedia</a> is a type design masters program in the Netherlands and each year a graduating class of designers band together to make a little website showcasing their work. I get real excited for these because they’re always a delight and the work from <a href="https://2021.typemedia.org/">2021</a> is certainly no different. Shocking shapes! Curious, distorted glyphs! Gah!</p>
<p>Ivo Brouwer’s outrageously pretty typeface <a href="https://2021.typemedia.org/ivo.html">Surround</a> is the one that caught my eye first though:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/the-infinite.webp" alt="An example of the Surround typeface, showing how multiple letters can be stacked to let the colors of each bleed through" /></p>
<p>Holy woof, Batman! As soon as I saw this thing I wanted to plaster it on a million book covers and experiment with each of the different layers. Here’s how Ivo describes it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Surround is a chromatic typeface system made for playful typesetting. It consists of 5 unique styles, that can be used both individual and superimposed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Playful indeed. You can stack these letters on top of each other and get an imperfect, risograph zine-like-look. I think that you have to be pretty careful with the colors here though as some of the options feel really hard to read. Also: I would love to see a thinner version of Surround.</p>
<p>But—all of this is incredibly exciting (look at <a href="https://2021.typemedia.org/neva.html">Zalfia</a>!). And if you’re interested in learning more about what the course is like, you can read this piece by Stephen Nixon about <a href="https://www.typefloundry.com/things-learned-at-typemedia.html">what he learned at TypeMedia</a>.</p>
Livewired2022-08-02T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/livewired/<p>There’s an idea in David Eagleman’s <em>Livewired</em> that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this week. Here’s the setup: our brains have a physical map of our bodies printed on them. You touch this part of your brain—blam!—your elbow just felt that. You go down and—double blam!—it’ll feel as if your forearm has been pressed in the same way.</p>
<p>That’s fine and interesting and all, but what’s more interesting about this discovery is how different regions of your brain are in constant conflict with one another. If you close your eyes for a few days then your other senses will literally, <em>physically</em>, override those parts of the brain that are devoted to your eyes—you’ll hear better, feel better. David calls this “cortical takeover” throughout the book.</p>
<p>One hypothesis in the book about why we dream is likewise disturbing: we dream so that the parts of our brain that control our legs or ears or nose don’t “override” our eyes during the night. That’s wild! But then it all leads to this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This hypothesis leads to a prediction for the distant future, when we discover life on other planets...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>...(I love the positive note here; not if, but when)...</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Some planets (especially those orbiting red dwarf stars) become locked into place, such that they always have the same surface facing their star: they thus have permanent day on one side of the planet, and permanent night on the other. If life-forms on that planet were to have livewired brains even vaguely similar to ours, the prediction would be that those on the daylight side of the planets might have vision like us but would <em>not</em> have dreams. The same prediction would apply for very fast-spinning planets: if the nighttime is shorter than the time of a cortical takeover, then dreaming would also be unnecessary. Thousands of years hence, we might finally know whether we dreamers are in the universal minority.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There’s a lot of fun, pop sci-fi in this book so far and so I’d highly recommend it.</p>
Happy in the Second2022-07-29T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/happy-in-the-second-/<p>“I am happiest in the second,” he said. “I can look at each frame of my animation and tell you what’s wrong, what the right order should be, and then fixate on that one perfect second for days. That’s what makes me happy.”</p>
<p>Fancy wine in one hand, bocce ball in the other, I was talking to an animator and peppering him with questions about his work. We talked about time and how, even though our work could not be more different, we both wanted to zoom into the smallest possible bucket of time and hold that second in place; stretch it out, examine it, build it up, break it down.</p>
<p>I don’t know what the right timeframe is for my writing though. It’s variable. Sometimes I want to hover above a single sentence and tune things up, cut things out, but for days or weeks on end. At least a few sentences I’ve held in place for months whilst I poke and prod at them. Other times I want to skim across whole paragraphs like a stone across a pond—writing a few pages of something in ten minutes go, go, go.</p>
<p>What’s the right timeframe to think about for my blog? A season? A year? A century? I hope so!</p>
<p>When I’m building websites, the timeframe is smaller. Most projects die off within a year of me having worked on them. That’s always a bummer but I tend to obsess about this one frame between frames—this 3 second CSS animation—all night long. Or a brief typographic moment that most folks will never see.</p>
<p>Either way, I’m happiest working in these small parcels of time. Perhaps not seconds like the animator, but maybe a minute? A second is too small to reveal something effective with a website or some words strung together on a page, but with a whole minute? That’s just enough time to do some wild, dazzling thing.</p>
<p>What timeframe do type designers think in? I’m in no place to say but from what I understand the patience required is monumental with some projects. Just a single glyph—a humble little lowercase <em>k</em>—could be held in place and worked on for years. A whole typeface? Maybe a decade.</p>
<p>And in all that time they sketch and draw and extrapolate.</p>
<p>I’m not saying this to mythologize type design, but rather to understand what good work often requires. This relentless discipline, this masterful control of time. And of course, all this reminds me of Paul Ford’s piece about <a href="https://contentsmagazine.com/articles/10-timeframes/">time and seasons, interaction design, and heartbeats</a> well spent:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If we are going to ask people, in the form of our products, in the form of the things we make, to spend their heartbeats—if we are going to ask them to spend their heartbeats on us, on our ideas, how can we be sure, far more sure than we are now, that they spend those heartbeats wisely?</p>
</blockquote>
Every Photograph from Shadows2022-07-26T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/every-photography-from-shadows/<p>I took a lot of photos for <a href="https://robinrendle.com/essays/in-praise-of-shadows"><em>In Praise of Shadows</em></a> and after a ton of humming and hawing and editing in Lightroom, I think I discovered at least one or two good pictures in the batch. So! Considering I hid all that with the stubborn text sitting on top, I thought it would be fun to show all the photographs here.</p>
<div class="about-img no-margin">
<img alt="A human shadow distorted across a wooden fence with a finger extended, pointing to the right" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/1.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A glass case of ancient fossils and the shoulder of a woman looking at the material" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/2.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A pink flower framed in a sea of wet green leaves" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/3.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="Large rocks along a shoreline with the number 13 painted on the center most rock" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/4.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A woman with a camera around her neck, standing on the porch outside a wooden building" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/5.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A black and white picture of a large pond in the rain. In the distance a group of tourists descend a small hill." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/6.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="The reflection of a man in a mirror smiling, with a camera around his neck" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/7.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A person stands on a cracked pavement" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/8.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A grassy field with the sea in the horizon. A hint of red flowers in the middle." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/9.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="The tiniest of green cars is parked by the side of the road. In the background, a twisted net of branches covers a wall." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/10.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A seagull is centered in the middle of a great blue sky." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/11.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="Midday shadows along a rocky cliff." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/12.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A bookshelf." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/13.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="Downtown San Francisco, seen from Twin Peaks. A road curves around itself in the foreground and a lone cyclist can be seen as a tiny dot." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/14.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="Grafiti markings on a pavement." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/16.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="Bernal Hill in the distance. It’s a summer’s day. It is warm and my feet hurt." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/17.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="The FujiFilm X100V on a desk. The screen is lit up. The hotel room is cold but I’m excited to get out and take pictures all day long." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/18.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="The FujiFilm X100V again. A photograph of a book is seen on the LCD screen." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/19.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="The FujiFilm X100V yet again. But this time from a different angle. Sorry." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/20.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="Red, pinkish flowers stretch up a stone wall." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/21.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A boat sails along the Seine towards a bridge. I wonder where it’s going. Everyone looks happy." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/22.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A blurry photo taken from a car of a field with power lines and a large, squat building in the background" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/23.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="The muscular stone back of a man in statue. He looks down to the right." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/24.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A woman stands in a greenhouse. Sunlight shines through the glass windows and a nest of sticks and leaves curves along her left hand side. Shadows everywhere." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/25.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="In the Japanese Tea Garden in Portland, Oregon a couple shelter from the rain beneath a red and blue umbrella." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/26.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A prickly green bush." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/27.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="From a window, a string of houses huddle on a hillside. Trees. A yellow road sign pointing to the left." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/28.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A Japanese Garden. It’s cold, it’s wet. I have had too much food." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/29.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A beautiful metal shop sign that reads 'Galerie Vivienne' is splattered with shadows in the afternoon sun." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/30.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="Two pink flowers are found in the middle of a tiny forest of green pointy leaves." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/31.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A tree with flowers on every branch stretches up into a big blue sky." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/32.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="Shadows criss-cross their way along the teeth of an enormous whale skeleton" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/33.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A beach in Florida. Soft clouds. Scratches and footsteps in the sand. A jogger running into the distance." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/34.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="White shoes on gravel." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/35.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="Gold and candles and intricate carvings on a palace wall. Paintings and red curtains. Oppulence." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/36.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A Japanese lantern in the middle of the street." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/37.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A house in the distance. Foliage, trees, everywhere." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/38.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="Rain falls from the underside of a roof. In the background a mossy roof of a Japanese building can be clearly seen" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/39.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A hand rests on a bannister overlooking a museum filled to the brim with ancient skeletons" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/40.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A large golden sign on a white building reads: 'Albert Tronc'" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/41.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="The Venus de Milo in the Louvre, France. The statue’s arms have been removed and she leans off to one side." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/42.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A tiny hole in a wooden fence reveals a house in the distance like a porthole at sea" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/43.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A red leaf rests peacefully on the pavement. Cracks and shadows. A white spray can has marked the space next to it for some reason." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/44.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A seagull rests on a lamp post with a freeway sign beneath." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/45.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="Human, monkey, chimpanzee, and ape skulls in a row with small placards written in French nearby." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/46.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A distorted shadow cuts a yellow building cleanly in two." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/47.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A lazy Sunday perfectly captured: criss-crossing electrical lines, a great blue sky, the hills of Noe Valley in San Francisco." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/48.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A woman with a backpack walks up a hill. Trees block her path and surround her." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/49.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="Green and spritely, a little bush full of wet leaves sits in the foreground, a wooden fence made of slats in the background." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/50.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="The FujiFilm X100V resting on a wooden desk." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/51.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A clumsy picture of a man’s face, looking down on the camera as it accidentally taitkes a picture of him." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/52.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A beautiful hotel in Paris. Flags wave in the breeze." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/53.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="Foxtails are dangerous she said. I never step on them because they always hurt my dog. I laugh because her dog, Baby, is the most pathetic and beautiful create I’ve ever met. I hop over the fence, look down and snap a picture. A constellation of foxtails in every direction." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/54.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A photograph of a very cool man. The man is holding a camera, obscuring his face." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/55.webp" loading="lazy" />
<img alt="A woman walks up the stairs of the Louvre. The evening’s shadows are wilting along the stairwell and at the top, a small cluster of trees welcome her." src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows/56.webp" loading="lazy" />
</div>
The Great Fiction of AI2022-07-21T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-great-fiction-of-ai/<p>How is writing going to be affected by AI tools like <a href="https://www.sudowrite.com/">Sudowrite</a>? Josh Dzieza has written this fabulous piece for the Verge called <a href="https://www.theverge.com/c/23194235/ai-fiction-writing-amazon-kindle-sudowrite-jasper">The Great Fiction</a> of AI in hope of finding some answers. He tells the story of Jennifer Lepp, a fiction writer who uses these tools to help her crank out books faster:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Gradually, Lepp figured out how to steer the AI. She likened the process to divination. She had to edit and revise its output. But, even then, she found that it lightened the load of a job that, as much as she loved it, was mentally draining. She no longer ended each day struggling to summon the prose she needed to hit her target, exhausted. The words came easier.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In a decade or so there’s gonna be a big story about how someone wrote a novel with nothing but pen and paper. No AI! No search engines! No side kicks! It’ll be a huge story about how this kid locked themselves away in a cabin near a beach and literally wrote a manuscript with only their melancholy and loneliness to guide the way.</p>
<p>And we will look upon them and feel jealous of their bravery.</p>
The Future2022-07-11T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-future/<p>Klim Type Foundry just released <a href="https://klim.co.nz/retail-fonts/the-future/">The Future</a>, a reimagining of Futura but from the original sketches rather than the more polished version that we’re all familiar with today. Kris Sowersby writes about all this and <a href="https://klim.co.nz/blog/the-future-design-information/">the history of Futura</a> as well as what inspired him to design The Future:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Renner was working at the nexus of his own personal, classic taste, heated debates about the abolition of fraktur for roman type, and the reductionism of the avant-garde zeitgeist. He re-evaluated ancient letterforms through primal geometric construction to create Futura. Geometry fulfilled two promises: the foundation of the past and the machine-made progression of the future.</p>
<p>[...] Almost a century later they still look amazing. It’s 2022 and they’re still like new; their primal geometric power is undiminished. And they’re surprisingly readable. Sprinkled carefully in a paragraph of text they’re noticeable but not overly obtrusive. In headlines they command attention. I can almost imagine Renner working today, uploading them to his Instagram account.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Futura is one of those typefaces where its popularity has made me loathe it. It’s always used incorrectly, like Helvetica. Those typefaces are used so poorly so often that I tend to forget the value of the letterforms themselves and all I see is the failed application of lovely forms.</p>
<p>But The Future Light at 24px? Now that’s a beautiful, beautiful thing.</p>
In Praise of Shadows2022-07-11T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/in-praise-of-shadows/<p>Pals! Nerds! Photo-buddies! I just hit the big green publish button on a new essay called <em><a href="https://robinrendle.com/essays/in-praise-of-shadows">In Praise of Shadows</a></em>. Here’s the cover:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/shadows.png" alt="The cover of my website, In Praise of Shadows" /></p>
<p>It’s an essay about photography and my new camera, the FujiFilm X100V, but it’s also about what I’ve learned over the past six months; where to put my feet, how to line things up, how to edit photographs. It’s about a bunch of mistakes I’ve made and it’s also about how this camera has changed how I see the world a bit.</p>
<p>But the real exciting thing to me about all this is really the format.</p>
<p>It’s a big scrolly essay (optimized mostly for your phone) and you can click anywhere to progress or turn back to a previous "slide". Also, the images that I’m describing in the essays are hidden, mischeviously obfuscated by the text that sits on top:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/ready.png" alt="An example slide from the website" /></p>
<p>I know some people already kinda don’t like this (how can you have an essay about photography without showing me the photograph!) but that’s all part of the fun. I’m not a great photographer, and really the pictures I’m taking are not as important as what I’ve learned over the last six months. Plus, it creates this air of mystery that I like.</p>
<p>Anyway, that’s it. I’d love your thoughts/unrelenting praise if you have any. Go read this thing!</p>
A playground, a wellspring2022-07-11T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/a-playground,-a-wellspring/<p>Whenever I open up DevTools and inspect a website I feel this overwhelming sense of lost potential. Here’s just one example: today I wanted to buy a pillow so I went to casper dot com, and saw this lovely animated gradient on a banner trying to sell me something. Interesting! I popped open Chrome’s DevTools to see how they were doing it with CSS and this is what I could see...</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/devtools-1.webp" alt="An example of Chrome’s DevTools highlighting a CSS keyframe animation" /></p>
<p>...where is the animation? It’s called <code>gradientKeyframe</code> here but...where is it? What if I wanted to click into it and start experimenting, editing, copy and pasting it into my own website? I’m sure I can do this somewhere, right? But it’s not clear to me and I’d probably have to go digging through the CSS file itself and search for the keyframe.</p>
<p>In this example DevTools feels like...a dead end?</p>
<p>Another dead end I see in DevTools is anything to do with fonts. It’s sort of maddening that it’s 2022 and Google’s browser cannot tell me what font is currently used in this particular element, in the same way that Firefox can so easily.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/devtools-2.webp" alt="An example of Firefox’s Developer Tools displaying the Fonts tab where you can see each of the fonts that a website has been using" /></p>
<p>Here’s Firefox showing me which element is using which font and then a big list of all the fonts that are available on the site. This is a marvelous feature! And considering how difficult it is sometimes to see visually which fonts have loaded, this info gives me confidence I’m doing something right when I build my own website.</p>
<p>But regardless of missing features, the biggest disappointment of all developer tools in every browser is the unanswered question that lies at the very heart of them all: what about the fun? Because today I see DevTools as merely a command line for the web (the web developers won whilst the cypher punks and the dark web hacker dweebs lost). There’s just no joy or incentive to experiment or play in this interface, no push and pull to learn something new about how this website did this one cool weird thing.</p>
<p>(I remember talking to <a href="https://aresluna.org/">Marcin</a> many moons ago about the disappointment we both felt with DevTools and how it doesn’t give new web developers a kick in the right direction, it doesn’t explain how a website works but just...shows you the code.)</p>
<p>Take a look at what the Arc browser is doing with <a href="https://www.loom.com/share/55e80c00d4444579b5d0de49d9ffc650">Boosts</a> as an example of what DevTools could be; experimental, fun, and downright cool. In Arc’s vision of the web, websites aren’t this thing you build in between meetings with your manager, but are instead toys that you can mold and reshape in the palm of your hand. Arc brings back the spirit of learning what a <code><br /></code> tag is for your dorky MySpace profile.</p>
<p>So DevTools requires reimagining. Away with the tools for developers! Let’s bring back the weirdness and experimentation and the joy of building a website again! Give us software to peel back all the layers of HTML and CSS and customize them, remix them, riff on code that we barely understand.</p>
<p>I think that’s what’s required to build great websites and teach the next generation of web folk. Ultimately we need to unthink of these things as tools for developers and see them for what they really are; a playground, a wellspring, for making websites.</p>
<p>Because DevTools isn’t that.</p>
<p>DevTools is a dead end.</p>
We’re Not Going Back to the Time Before Roe. We’re Going Somewhere Worse2022-07-03T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/somewhere-worse/<p><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/07/04/we-are-not-going-back-to-the-time-before-roe-we-are-going-somewhere-worse">Jia Tolentino</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The future that we now inhabit will not resemble the past before Roe, when women sought out illegal abortions and not infrequently found death. The principal danger now lies elsewhere, and arguably reaches further. We have entered an era not of unsafe abortion but of widespread state surveillance and criminalization. [...] Those who argue that this decision won’t actually change things much—an instinct you’ll find on both sides of the political divide—are blind to the ways in which state-level anti-abortion crusades have already turned pregnancy into punishment, and the ways in which the situation is poised to become much worse.</p>
</blockquote>
Late night website work2022-06-20T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/late-night-website-work/<p>I made a bunch of fun updates to the site last night: fixed a lot of the default typography styles (they’re not good yet, please hold!), added a few colors, replaced a ton of tags in older blog posts, and sort of redesigned the homepage around that. Now when you head to the homepage you won’t see a list of notes but a bunch of categories, instead. I’m still working through how I want that to work but there’s a few old posts in there that I like, posts that have disappeared into the archive.</p>
<p>Also last night was well spent looking for a typeface: oh the joy of watching a bad movie in the background whilst my computer is chock full of test fonts and .pdf specimens and endless tabs upon tabs of letters!</p>
<p>Of the many miracles I discovered last night, Grilli Type’s <a href="https://www.grillitype.com/free-trial-fonts">Free Trails</a> was among the best. They let you download their whole font catalogue and from there you can import them into your website, switching things out quickly and playfully. So after a few experiments and click-clacking fonts together I settled on <a href="https://www.grillitype.com/typeface/gt-alpina">GT Alpina</a>, a buck wild serif that matches my writing somewhat well.</p>
<p>So what’s left for the site now? Well, I’ve still gotta polish a lot of things, fix the typography some more, redesign the homepage and think about how all these tags can act like little magazines or something.</p>
The Smallest CSS2022-06-13T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-smallest-css/<p>What’s the smallest amount of CSS that you can write to make HTML look halfway decent? I took a crack at that today after I removed all the styles from my website and went back to Eleventy. Here’s what I’ve got so far.</p>
<p>First up you gotta have those responsive images...</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">img</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">max-width</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 100%<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>And secondly...</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">html</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">color-scheme</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> light dark<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>...that’s what’s required for dark mode these days? <a href="https://web.dev/color-scheme/">This is amazing</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The color-scheme property [...] allows an element to indicate which color schemes it is comfortable being rendered with. These values are negotiated with the user's preferences, resulting in a chosen color scheme that affects user interface (UI) things such as the default colors of form controls and scroll bars, as well as the used values of the CSS system colors.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Not so fast! Looks like there’s a gnarly <a href="https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=209851">bug in Safari</a> where the link colors are pretty dang inaccessible:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/website-safari-example.webp" alt="A screenshot of this website in Safari, showing the inaccessible colors when the color-scheme CSS property is enabled" /></p>
<p>So, for now, I can’t use this <code>color-scheme</code> stuff to toggle dark mode automatically. Shucks. But okay, onto the text. We use system fonts to give ourselves a baseline because almost every device now has pretty amazing system fonts these days:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">body</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-family</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> -apple-system<span class="token punctuation">,</span> BlinkMacSystemFont<span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token string">"Segoe UI"</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span> Roboto<span class="token punctuation">,</span> Helvetica<span class="token punctuation">,</span> Arial<span class="token punctuation">,</span> sans-serif<span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token string">"Apple Color Emoji"</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token string">"Segoe UI Emoji"</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token string">"Segoe UI Symbol"</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span></code></pre>
<p>Then we can add a tiny bit of padding just to beef up the margins on smaller devices:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">body</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-family</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> -apple-system<span class="token punctuation">,</span> BlinkMacSystemFont<span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token string">"Segoe UI"</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span> Roboto<span class="token punctuation">,</span> Helvetica<span class="token punctuation">,</span> Arial<span class="token punctuation">,</span> sans-serif<span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token string">"Apple Color Emoji"</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token string">"Segoe UI Emoji"</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token string">"Segoe UI Symbol"</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">padding</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 0 15px<span class="token punctuation">;</span></code></pre>
<p>...we can then set a max-width on the body element to prevent things from stretching out too wide on larger devices:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">body</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-family</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> -apple-system<span class="token punctuation">,</span> BlinkMacSystemFont<span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token string">"Segoe UI"</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span> Roboto<span class="token punctuation">,</span> Helvetica<span class="token punctuation">,</span> Arial<span class="token punctuation">,</span> sans-serif<span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token string">"Apple Color Emoji"</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token string">"Segoe UI Emoji"</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token string">"Segoe UI Symbol"</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">padding</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 0 15px<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">max-width</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 650px<span class="token punctuation">;</span></code></pre>
<p>And finally we can set a bigger font-size and pair that with a slightly bigger line-height for legibility:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">body</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-family</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> -apple-system<span class="token punctuation">,</span> BlinkMacSystemFont<span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token string">"Segoe UI"</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span> Roboto<span class="token punctuation">,</span> Helvetica<span class="token punctuation">,</span><br /> Arial<span class="token punctuation">,</span> sans-serif<span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token string">"Apple Color Emoji"</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token string">"Segoe UI Emoji"</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token string">"Segoe UI Symbol"</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">padding</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 0 15px<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">max-width</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 650px<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-size</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 115%<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">line-height</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 1.4<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>Oh wait finally for real this time:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">pre code</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">white-space</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> pre-wrap<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>...I noticed the code blocks are unreadable since they don’t wrap by default, so I slapped this on at the last minute.</p>
<p>But that’s about it! I think I’ll leave it like this tonight. But it’s kind of amazing what you can do with less than 15 lines of CSS.</p>
Framer CMS2022-05-27T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/framer-cms/<p>What the who the what? I clearly have not been paying enough attention to <a href="https://www.framer.com/">Framer</a> because they just released something called “Framer Sites” which looks impressive to say the least: but the TL;DR is that you can now use Framer as a full blown Content Management System.</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/JmIWAhF9ioo" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>What! That’s amazing.</p>
<p>Also, side note, but Framer seems to be in a weird position, product-wise. Not only is it taking over from Figma as the industry’s leading-edge design tool, but with this whole idea of building websites from within Framer itself, I can't help but think that it’s also replacing Notion? Weird! Either way, describing Framer as just a simple design tool feels really shortsighted — just look at how easy it is to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgHLY5IAz6Q">design things across breakpoints</a> as an example.</p>
<p>I guess my point here is that today I used Figma and it felt like I was designing a series of pages. But with Framer it feels like you’re building <em>systems</em> instead.</p>
<p>And that’s something to watch/celebrate.</p>
The Week of Too Many Things2022-05-26T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-week-of-too-many-things/<p>I just started an enormous project at work. It is blisteringly, gob-smackingly large. The biggest project I’ve ever worked on by far, and just the sort of thing not to be measured in sprints or seasons but whole dang years. And yes, despite my overwhelming charisma and my handsome dashing-ness etc. etc., of course I’m worried I’ll mess it up and make some half-baked decision that sends the whole thing crumbling to its knees. But sometimes anxiety is a good sign!</p>
<p>And sometimes it’s absolutely not! If you’re not careful—THEN!—the anxiety can become so overwhelming that you feel like a bowl of cold pudding trying to grasp the heat death of the universe. The problem being so vast, incomprehensible, and foreign to you that it’s impossible to know where to begin. Is this the right problem to tackle first? What about this problem? Or that one? What if all the problems are really just one big problem and you need to sit back and try to understand an interstellar group of quantum possibilities when you’re just a barely functional bowl of cold pudding?</p>
<p>Anyway. That was my week.</p>
<p>In order to stop this project from hijacking my whole personality with anxiety, I stopped playing all the stressful games I’ve been playing lately and sat down to do something impossible: watch a whole movie from start to finish in one sitting. But oh boy what a movie it was! If you are currently overwhelmed with everything then I would highly recommend <em>After Yang</em>. There’s no violent plot twist, no evil villain, and no impossible problems to overcome until the next episode.</p>
<p>Instead, <em>After Yang</em> is the textbook definition of <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/adventures/cardigan-sci-fi/">cardigan sci-fi</a>. It is slow and warm and everyone is wearing soft colors and fabrics. They drink tea from the safety of their luscious gardens, and the outside world feels…safe. It’s a very calming and bittersweet movie which I refuse to say anything more about it in case I spoil it but in one montage I confidently, heroically, wept like the bowl of cold pudding that I am.</p>
Optical Size And Variable Fonts2022-05-15T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/optical-size-and-variable-font-defaults/<p>Choosing a font is always a problem of size. Sure, you want to pick a serif or a fancy geometric sans—the style is important—but what’s the size of the text? There’s an enormous difference between 14px and 200px and likewise you can’t pick a typeface for a billboard and a tiny book and expect them to both look just fine. You have to optimize for one size or another.</p>
<p>Here’s an example: Warbler Display vs. <a href="https://djr.com/notes/warbler-text-font-of-the-month">Warbler Text</a>. You can see below that at the same size, the Display version is nigh-on unreadable when compared to Text.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/display-versus-text.webp" alt="An example of Warbler Display and Text versions side by side at really small size, showing how the Display version is basically unreadable" /></p>
<p>It’s so thin and fragile! My eyes refuse to read it at that size. But at larger sizes, the opposite is true. All those fine details of Warbler Display that are lost become visible and crisp whereas Warbler Text (on the right) now feels too thick and clunky at this size...</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/display-size.webp" alt="Now an example of both typefaces at a much larger size" /></p>
<p>Why? Typefaces have to be designed for a certain size or a range of sizes. So, in the past, whenever you’re setting text, you’d need to be careful picking the right font depending on whatever it was that you were designing. That’s why so many type families will have micro, text, book, display, and banner variants.</p>
<p>It sure gets complicated, but having this flexibility is dead useful.</p>
<p>Yet now with variable fonts we don’t have to worry about that sort of thing so much because of <em>optical sizing</em>. This is a setting contained within some fonts that determines how it should look at certain sizes: the thickness of the strokes, the width of each glyph, basically everything about a font could change depending on the font size, all in an attempt to make the text read well across all those different environments, from small to large.</p>
<p>Below you can see that I’ve selected a variable font version of <a href="https://djr.com/output">Output</a> in Figma:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/figma-example-variable.webp" alt="A screenshot of the variable settings within the Figma design app" /></p>
<p>...see how in the variable submenu that 'Set optical size automatically' is on? What that means is that when I change the font-size then a number of properties will change to make the text more readable. You can see this best though when you turn it off and manually change the optical size axis:</p>
<video autoplay="" loop="" muted="" inline="">
<source src="https://robinrendle.com/images/figma-example-animated.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
</video>
<p>At larger sizes the text will tighten up, getting rid of excess white space. At small sizes, everything stretches out to make it easier to discern one character from another. Now, optical size isn’t something I’ve ever messed with before. But I’ve always felt that it should be automatic (just as Figma does it today) and I don’t think this was ever possible before variable fonts (but I could be wrong there). It’s pretty darn neat.</p>
<p>So optical size is this lovely additional, hidden feature that likely most people won’t even know is enabled for their variable fonts but — what if optical size could be used to switch between Display/Text versions of a typeface? I’m also sure this is not the first time someone’s thought of that but whenever do I want to use a text face at 80pt? I feel like optical size should kinda be the magic default of a typeface, giving you guidance and correcting things (for example switching between micro, text, display, banner versions without you even toggling that axes on).</p>
<p>Then, if I wanted to, a variable font could let me customize everything. But I kinda like seeing optical sizing as a passive aggressive default—or recommendation system. Optical sizing could say: “We Highly Recommend You Turn These Features On, Sir.” And I’m sure there’s dozens of reasons why that’s not the case today but—but—what if variable fonts could take a guess at what you wanted based on the environment you’re typesetting in (like font-size or maybe even line-height or anything else)?</p>
<p>What if?</p>
Interconnected2022-05-13T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/interconnected/<p>The most upsetting thing about Elden Ring is not the difficulty, it’s the sheer imagination of the world building.</p>
<p>A lot of games are like here’s the snow zone, here’s the forest zone, here’s the desert zone. They’re really not much more than aesthetic changes, a touch of paint really.</p>
<p>But Elden Ring says no.</p>
<p>Behold! A half-built city emerging from the bark of an enormous golden tree! Or a winter landscape where giant creatures have been frozen into the landscape! Or a cloud city surrounded by tornadoes and made entirely of dragon bone! Here! Here! Here!</p>
<p>Every five minutes you bump into one magical location after another. And whenever I hit that infamous, impassable wall of difficulty, it was this feeling that kept pushing me forward: What’s behind that wall? What’s under this castle? What’s up on that hill? In most games you know the answer before you ask the question, but in Elden Ring <em>dear elden lord</em> anything is possible.</p>
<p>I worry this game has broken me though. It’s set a new bar for what a world should feel like in a video game; an interconnected, unknowable place.</p>
Infamy2022-05-13T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/infamy-/<p>There’s a famous blogger who lives near me. We don’t know each other, I’m as far off their radar as could possibly be. But it reminds of what San Francisco felt like when I first moved here six years ago; less a city full of anonymous strangers and more like the timeline come to life. You’d see your heroes in the corridor, in the street, at the airport, at a party, and you’d have been reading their work, watching their videos, retweeting them for decades.</p>
<p>Oh, that house over there in Berkeley? That’s a famous journalist who writes wondrous things about climate change. Oh, that park near those colorful houses over there? That’s where the best writer in the video game business walks their dog. Oh, that curiously-shaped building next to the freeway? Your favorite novelist lives there.</p>
<p>(This reminds me of the one time I went to a conference in Brighton when I was 19 with my dad. In the morning we stumbled out of the hotel room and went downstairs and I found that the entire place was <em>full</em> of people from the timeline. It was terrifying.)</p>
<p>This proximity to my favorite people, my writerly heroes, was and still is a confusing combination of odd and lovely whilst also terrifying at the same time.</p>
<p>First off, the nice stuff: living in San Francisco sometimes feels like everyone in this city is working closely together, writing on top of each other, figuring things out at the same time. I think that’s why I love seeing that famous blogger hop on their bike each morning because it reminds me that I’ve gotta try harder, too. To the blog! But, also, nevertheless: it scares me because everyone is now a public figure. You can’t just be a person who blogs or paints or whatever and then walk around the world with the safety of anonymity.</p>
<p>Speaking of which, I’ve only had one modest dose of this—a tiny, almost insignificant portion of fame, but, but, but...I did not like it.</p>
<hr />
<p>One summer, during lunch, I hopped on my motorcycle and drove to an office downtown to meet a friend for coffee at a startup. I took the elevator up and I got thoroughly confused by the lack of signage—I appeared to be stuck in a beautiful labyrinth. Just as I had resigned myself to this fate, someone bumps into me in the corridor: “Yo Robin! How’s it going?”</p>
<p>Now, as much as I love hearing my own name shouted loudly in public places, it was a bit odd because I’d never met this chap before, and had no idea who they were. They didn’t introduce themselves either! Did I know them? Had I forgotten them? I shook their hand and introduced myself but it felt <em>weird</em>. As if, had I asked them who they were, it would’ve been a grave insult.</p>
<p>Oh you don’t know me???</p>
<p>It felt like...something had been taken from me in the exchange.</p>
<p>But I was probably being weird and paranoid, never mind that. This perfectly nice, nameless chap buzzed me in and walked me round the office, leading me down one corridor after the next. Yet it was the strangest thing; everyone knew who I was. Each person in turn walked up to me, shook my hand, or shouted out my name. “Ohhhh! You’re that guy! Hi!!!!” and it was overwhelming and uncomfortable and odd. I felt awful that I didn’t know anyone but I felt this odd pressure to behave in a certain way. The spotlight was on me, there was some expectation I had to meet. Did these folks see some boring design tweet I made? But—after chatting with folks it was kinda clear they weren't all that interested in learning who I was either. They <em>wanted</em> the proximity to something they thought I had.</p>
<p>Who I was wasn’t really the point.</p>
<p>I think that’s what fame ultimately is; it’s de-humanizing. It makes human people into circular avatars. And I know all this sounds like bragging, but it ain’t. It made me horribly uncomfortable and I can only imagine that this short-lived experience is how actually famous folks experience the world around them—distant from others in a way that they can’t ever put into words.</p>
<p>I hope I’ve never treated anyone this way before. As a figment of my imagination, I mean, rather than as someone I should ask questions about.</p>
<p>Someone I should relearn from scratch.</p>
Typeface 32022-05-10T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/typeface-3/<p>Today I stumbled upon <a href="https://typefaceapp.com/">Typeface 3</a>, a great mac app that lets you organize all your fonts and test em out before you use em. It’s part font library and part design tool, where you can quickly see which fonts have which features and then mess around with them a bit before jumping into your design tool of choice.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/typeface-3.webp" alt="A screenshot of the Typeface 3 mac app" /></p>
<p>It’s really, really good. I immediately threw down $30 for the Pro version which seems like a bargain when it shows you each of the OpenType features of a font and all the variable axes, too.</p>
<p>I don’t know why I’ve never picked a dedicated font library app until now. I guess because organizing fonts has always been a small nightmare. I’ve simply had a folder in Dropbox that has all the custom fonts I’ve bought and whenever I want to use one I skim the folder or search randomly, painfully for things in macOS’s Font Book. Then I find it in Figma and open up the type panel to play around with it, realize that this font doesn’t quite work, then I go back to my Dropbox folder and start all over again.</p>
<p>Typeface 3 changes all that; I can quickly see fonts from my own library or fonts from Google or Adobe’s catalogue. That’s real neat! I can tag fonts, move fonts into folders, and even search by font with the best text underline style.</p>
<p>Which is of course something I will do.</p>
I wish I could control CSS scroll-snap with Javascript2022-04-30T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/i-wish-i-could-control-css-scroll-snap-with-javascript/<p>So I love CSS scroll-snap. I think it’s really, truly amazing.</p>
<p>Sure, yes, it lets you make <a href="https://codepen.io/robinrendle/full/YzyqNJK">carousels</a> that aren’t janky JavaScript nightmares—but I think they’re more than that because now we can make webpages feel more like, well, Powerpoint. And that’s an extremely exciting thing for writers! You can make websites behave like pages or comic books or photo books! You can control the <em>pace</em> of your work with nothing more than just a sliver of CSS.</p>
<p>To get started you’ll need to make a container with some slides:</p>
<pre class="language-html"><code class="language-html"><span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"><</span>div</span> <span class="token attr-name">class</span><span class="token attr-value"><span class="token punctuation attr-equals">=</span><span class="token punctuation">"</span>container<span class="token punctuation">"</span></span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span><br /> <span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"><</span>div</span> <span class="token attr-name">class</span><span class="token attr-value"><span class="token punctuation attr-equals">=</span><span class="token punctuation">"</span>slide<span class="token punctuation">"</span></span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span><br /> <span class="token comment"><!-- content goes here --></span><br /> <span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"></</span>div</span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span><br /> <span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"><</span>div</span> <span class="token attr-name">class</span><span class="token attr-value"><span class="token punctuation attr-equals">=</span><span class="token punctuation">"</span>slide<span class="token punctuation">"</span></span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span><br /> <span class="token comment"><!-- content goes here --></span><br /> <span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"></</span>div</span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span><br /><span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"></</span>div</span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span></code></pre>
<p>And then some CSS...</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">.wrapper</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">display</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> flex<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">gap</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 10px<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">overflow-y</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> scroll<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">scroll-snap-type</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> x mandatory<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">width</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 100vw<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">height</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 100vh<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><br /><span class="token selector">.slide</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">scroll-snap-align</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> start<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>And then you’re basically done! In this example, <code>x mandatory</code> will force this carousel to snap left->right when you move horizontally with your mouse (and heck, in Chrome you can even use the directional keys to move back and forth between slides!).</p>
<p>Check out this <a href="https://codepen.io/robinrendle/pen/xxYxVbK/02cef110b3f5feb4601797d321af7960?editors=1100">quick demo I made last night</a>—and try scrolling to the right:</p>
<p class="codepen" data-height="500" data-default-tab="result" data-slug-hash="xxYxVbK" data-user="robinrendle" data-token="02cef110b3f5feb4601797d321af7960" style="height: 600px; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; border: 2px solid; margin: 1em 0; padding: 1em;">
<span>See the Pen <a href="https://codepen.io/robinrendle/pen/xxYxVbK/02cef110b3f5feb4601797d321af7960">
X100v</a> by Robin Rendle (<a href="https://codepen.io/robinrendle">@robinrendle</a>)
on <a href="https://codepen.io/">CodePen</a>.</span>
</p>
<script async="" src="https://cpwebassets.codepen.io/assets/embed/ei.js"></script>
<p>But! One problem with this design is that users here won’t know that they can scroll right. I could put a big arrow or something on the first slide but what would be even neater is if I could use JavaScript to hijack the scroll maybe. So that when folks scroll down then it pushes folks to the next slide in the series. Maybe that would be disorienting as heck but I think it would be better than just doing...nothing, right?</p>
<p>The problem here is that I don’t think we can do this with JS today. As far as I can tell there’s no scroll-snap API where I can order JS to skip to slide 4 (which could be handy if this website had a table of contents). And I can’t hijack the scroll and say “next slide please”!</p>
<p>Alas, there’s only <a href="https://github.com/argyleink/ScrollSnapExplainers/tree/main/js-scrollToOptions_Snap-Additions">this proposal from Adam Argyle</a> which looks like it would perfectly solve this problem:</p>
<pre class="language-javascript"><code class="language-javascript">container<span class="token punctuation">.</span><span class="token function">scrollTo</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token literal-property property">left</span><span class="token operator">:</span> <span class="token string">"snap-first"</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span><br /> <span class="token literal-property property">top</span><span class="token operator">:</span> <span class="token string">"snap-first"</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span><br /> <span class="token literal-property property">behavior</span><span class="token operator">:</span> <span class="token string">"instant"</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span><span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span></code></pre>
<p>Wonderful! This is <em>exactly</em> what I want. Shame that I can’t use it today though.</p>
Trust2022-04-29T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/trust/<p><a href="https://adactio.com/journal/19021">Jeremy doesn’t trust third-party code</a>, but...</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m much more trusting of native browser features—HTML elements, CSS features, and JavaScript APIs. They’re not always perfect, but a lot of thought goes into their development. By the time they land in browsers, a whole lot of smart people have kicked the tyres and considered many different angles. As a bonus, I don’t need to install them. Even better, end users don’t need to install them.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>See, I am extremely confident that pretty much any HTML I write today will render the same way in 50 years’ time. How confident am I that my CSS will work correctly? Mmmm...70%. Hand-written JavaScript? Way less, maybe 50%. A third-party service I install on a website or link to? 0% confident. Heck, I’m doubtful that any third-party service will survive until next year, let alone 50 years from now.</p>
<p>I don’t think this is a cynical view of the web though! It feels realistic and, to me, oddly realistic: if we choose to build on strong foundations then it’s okay when we want to go "up the stack" and introduce some maybe more fragile things. Some of the fragile stuff is a really good idea, and useful today, so perhaps we should move that further "down" into the foundations so that they’re stable for the future.</p>
<p>I wonder what is up the stack that needs to be moved further down today...</p>
Attention and Email2022-04-28T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/attention-and-email-/<p>Almost every life-changing event for me started as an email, so email is way more important than I give it credit for. I should take better care of them, and I’ve written before about how I need to send more nice emails to folks to say thanks and/or hi. But: if someone’s a jerk, or they write to me as if I owe them something then nah. No email. No reply. And not sorry.</p>
<p>I know this is daring, bold, and some might even say courageous—but!—you absolutely do not need to reply to an email if you don’t want to. No one <em>deserves</em> your time and attention. Email is a request, not a demand.</p>
<p>I get the sense that a lot of people reply to every email because of this? Because maybe 80% of the folks who email me expect a swift reply (and I’m not at all bragging here since the amount of email I get from actual humans is way, way lower than most folks). But the humans that do email me always act as if we’re halfway through a conversation—and how dare I not respond to them! We were talking!</p>
<p>This, I think, is kinda shitty.</p>
<p>But if you’re reaching out about something earnestly? Heck yes. I want every single one of those, since they’re life-giving stuff. The Email of Emails. It’s the reason why computers exist.</p>
<p>I need all of them.</p>
Taking Shortcuts2022-04-23T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/taking-shortcuts/<p>As I was reading this post from Jim <a href="https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2019/netlify-public-folder-part-i-what/">about his setup</a> I got wildly, incomprehensibly jealous; he writes about having a folder on his desktop that he can just throw stuff into and it publishes to a website. This, to me, is the absolute dream. The ultimate writing setup.</p>
<p>Last week I was then determined to fix mine. I don’t want to have to go to a URL and click-clack my way through a clunky CMS, and I don’t want to have to constantly copy/paste things in VSCode. What I want instead is to just click a single button or drop a Markdown file in a folder. I want the distance between me and my website to be as small as possible.</p>
<p>So as I was playing with a million different ideas I started noodling with Shortcuts.app on macOS and I kept going and going, spending the next few nights playing with it and trying to optimize things.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/blog-shortcuts-image.webp" alt="" /></p>
<p>After a bit of faffing about, here’s what my new blogging setup looks like then:</p>
<ol>
<li>Write the blog post in iA Writer</li>
<li>Despair</li>
<li>Copy all the text from that markdown file</li>
<li>Hit the Shortcut icon called "Blog" that now sits in my Dock</li>
<li>This prompts me to add an extract for the post</li>
<li>The shortcut then gets to work, saving that extract text in a variable</li>
<li>And then it automatically adds this post metadata to a new file:</li>
</ol>
<pre><code>---
layout: layouts/note.njk
title:
date:
city: San Francisco
country: California
extract:
---
</code></pre>
<ol start="8">
<li>It gets today's date and fills that in along with the extract from the variable saved earlier</li>
<li>It magically grabs the title (like <code># Taking Shortcuts</code>) from the copied text and then renames the file to <code>taking-shortcuts.md</code></li>
<li>Then it moves that file to <code>/workspace/robinrendle.com/src/pages/notes/</code> which is where the git repo for my website lives locally.</li>
<li>After that, the shortcut opens the file in VS Code for any last minute changes and also GitHub.app, so I can quickly hit publish</li>
</ol>
<p>I’m sure I’ve made this a bit too complicated or fragile, and ideally I could somehow publish all this from the macOS Shortcut. But it’s somewhat better than what I had before. It would also be neat to boot up my site and see a quick preview of the same post, maybe popping open Chrome and heading to <code>localhost:1234/notes/name-of-post</code>! That would be really cool.</p>
<p>Anyway, I still think the ideal blogging setup is <a href="https://blot.im/">Blot</a>. You have a folder on your desktop, throw a markdown file into it, and blammo—your website updates immediately. Because of that setup, your website is always with you, always close by. And I feel that the only way to ensure that you write for your website is if it’s easy to update, easy to publish, easy to fix.</p>
<p>During all this I also added the <code>/images</code> folder for my website and moved it to my Dock. That way I can just drag and drop images in quickly. But ideally my macOS Shortcut would look for image paths in the markdown text, move that image to my repo, resize, compress, and then convert it to .webp.</p>
<p>For now I’ve just set up a custom <a href="https://software.charliemonroe.net/permute/">Permute</a> action to do that so it’s a separate annoying step but I wonder if I can connect all these dots together somehow. Also I can’t believe Permute doesn’t come with all computers out of the box. It’s essential.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/permute-example.webp" alt="" /></p>
<p>ANYWAY. I’m gonna keep tweaking my Blog shortcut and see if this really is better than anything else I can come up with.</p>
Church Going2022-04-23T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/church-going/<p>My parents and I are stood in a graveyard, looking up at a church in the perfect center of a quiant British countryside town. Everything around us is older than America; every brick and cobblestone path, every hedge and waist-high wall. And the lettering! (Each of the graves nearby are lettered by an expert hand.) And the food! (I’m happy because I’ve just eaten a much-needed full English breakfast.)</p>
<p>But I’m darting around the church grounds with my camera now, soaking up every ounce of Britishness that I can.</p>
<p><em>Snap. Click.</em></p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/gravestones.webp" alt="A photograph of gravestones" /></p>
<p>For the first time in years I’m feeling somewhat hopeful about my parents and my family. The day is, ya know, beautiful or whatever.</p>
<p>“Okay! So, I have a weird idea for a project: I want to jump on my motorcycle and drive all around the UK, stopping at every church and cathedral in the country. It would be for a book, of course, because every church must have a tale worthy of a book. There’s the breakup of the Protestants and the Catholics, the invasion of the French, the English Civil War! I’ve never thought much about churches, but they were at the center of everything in this country. Churches back then were the world wide web, the places that connected places together.”</p>
<p>I started rambling (which I have never done before in my life and you cannot prove otherwise): oh, the typography mom! oh, the bookbinding dad! I would make it a very quiet book; with a soft and creamy paper stock, a tiny flash of red and black on each page. Oh oh, this hypothetical book of mine would have the kind of paper where the ends are all torn up at the side, too.</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deckle#/media/File:Deckle_edge_book_(Chaucer).JPG">A deckle edge</a>!</p>
<p>I stopped ranting and turned on my heel to look back at my parents, all flush with excitement. They’d been quiet for too long, and there it was; that feeling of being excited, turning to them with a delicate little thing in my hands, and them looking back at me as if I hadn’t said anything at all. Complete, solid disinterest. Apathy at scale.</p>
<p>They both shuffled past me and the gravestones without saying anything.</p>
<p>A few awkward moments later and we’re sat outside a cafe nearby. The beautiful little church off to one side, looming over the moor. <em>Snap</em>. <em>Click</em>. I’m hopeful still, despite our conversation taking a strange turn. The last time I had a long chat on the phone with my mom was more than a year ago when I begged her to go to therapy. I told her this behavior was the opposite of normal, unhealthy. And in the last conversation I had with my dad on the phone I begged him to help her.</p>
<p>And then I called him a coward.</p>
<p>So this conversation was probably not gonna be great. Brexit had surely ruined our relationship, yes. That’s something I’ll never get over. But it was more than that. After having been away for so long, I noticed the undercurrents of violence in our family and I had become increasingly sensitive towards it now. The arguments, the bickering. The passive aggressive comments about absolutely nothing. Heck, I had moved halfway across the world and mostly cut my parents out of my life. Yet now it was at its worst.</p>
<p>This is where things get hazy though. A conversation with my family is like trying to gather shards of broken glass in your hands, and looking back on conversations with them I remember only fragments. Plus, talking about this stuff is depressing as all hell because you want to imagine your parents as being charming and dazzling, brilliant and funny. Everyone wants their parents to be heroic. But after years of verbal abuse you have to start protecting yourself. I want a healthy, loving relationship with you both, I said, but I don’t think that’s possible anymore. Your behavior is wild and unpredictable and also I love you.</p>
<p>At some point in the conversation, towards the end, my mom begs me to spend the day with her. Which, hey, seems pretty reasonable. I felt that familiar ricochet of guilt shooting around my body. No. My partner and I can’t spend the whole day with you. You’re violent. You’re abusive. And also I love you. Please go to therapy.</p>
<p>At one point in the conversation my mom grabs my arm, strongly, and talks to me like I’m a child. I’ll do as she says.</p>
<p>She can control this.</p>
<hr />
<p>After all these years she still frightens me. Despite being a good bit smaller than me, my mom has this way of knowing precisely what will hurt, knowing precisely where you’re weakest. She can pick a simple word like "because" and sharpen it into a blade that fits perfectly between your ribs. Combine that with her ability to take up all the space in a room, and, well...</p>
<p>I struggle a lot with all this. I mean, she’s my mom! I should love her no matter what. And, in time, I do. My fear subsides, things between us figure themselves out somehow, I forget who she’s become. And so our relationship returns to somewhat-normal. But then, out of nowhere, something terrible happens. Like the time I overcooked my lunch and she said to me, a week after a breakup, that “this is why no one will ever love you.”</p>
<p>And she meant it.</p>
<hr />
<p>Gathering the fragments together now, I remember a moment in the conversation where my mom swings from violent undertones and passive aggressive comments to pitying cries for attention. She tries guilt, shame, compliments, love. Anything that might work in her favor. My mom is manipulating me, trying to find a wedge, an emotional lock that she can break.</p>
<p>I un-grip her hand from my arm and I suddenly worry that this whole thing will turn violent, even though we’re sat in a public garden outside a cafe. I even worry about my partner inside that cafe, waiting for us all to return, and I remember that little spike of fear that plagued my teenage years. The feeling of being trapped, cornered, with no place to go.</p>
<p>God, I hadn’t felt that in years. Maybe a decade? Sometimes I fear that I’ve exaggerated those moments in my memory but no, here it is again. That feeling is...well...<em>true</em>.</p>
<hr />
<p>Another fragment: I gently placed my camera on the table before we sit and, a few shards later, when the conversation spikes in anxiety and bananas-ness, I grab it, cradling it in my lap. I worried that in her anger my mom would hurl it across the garden or smash it on the table just to spite me. And honestly? I still feel guilty about moving the camera away from her, because the very thought that your mom would take something and smash it in front of you as a 31 year old dude is...uh...less than great huh.</p>
<p>Somewhere amongst the fragments of this conversation I half-remember my dad quietly suggesting that I’ve lost my mind. Have I? My mom begs me to get dinner with them that evening and I know that’s impossible. How on earth can we get dinner when you’re going to behave like this? How can I put my partner through that? I notice people look over at our table, others walk around us awkwardly to get to the cafe.</p>
<p>And it’s this moment that I feel genuine pity for them.</p>
<p>They don’t understand what’s happening or why. They can’t see why I’m making this boundary between us and it’s impossible to describe it to them no matter how. Heck, even my response to their behavior feels bananas.</p>
<p>At some point I get up to leave and I hug my mom who starts crying. I love you, mom. Maybe let’s grab a quick beer tonight instead huh? Just you and me. Things momentarily feel better although nothing is resolved. She slowly gets into her car and I feel terrible, shaking. I walk down the small lane away from the cafe and back to the church to calm down. I require graves and cobblestones and waist-high walls. But as I step across the lane this terrible thought slips into my head: what if my mom hits me with her car?</p>
<p>It’s all paranoia, maybe, hopefully, probably. I think. I hope.</p>
<p>The stoic little church lay just ahead though and so hey, if this church can survive the turmoil and chaos of half a millennium, then perhaps there’s hope for us all. And maybe there’s hope for this relationship with my parents, too.</p>
<p>I grip my camera tightly in my hands, shaking.</p>
<p><em>Snap. Click.</em></p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/church.webp" alt="A photograph of an old church against a cloudy, blue sky" /></p>
Blogging and the heat death of the universe2022-04-20T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/blogging-and-the-heat-death-of-the-universe/<p>Here’s a fun thing: the other day <a href="https://twitter.com/m_ott/status/1516136120198836224">Matthias linked</a> to an <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/essays/new-web-typography/">old essay</a> of mine—please do not read it because <em>yikes</em>—but I noticed that it looks very different now; the layout is busted in a few places, the animations have stopped altogether, and <a href="https://www.typotheque.com/fonts/nocturno">Nocturno</a> has been replaced with sturdy, reliable, good-ol’ Georgia.</p>
<p>What happened here?</p>
<p>Well, some things were lost in the shuffle from one build process to another but these regressions also happened because I was using a lot of third party scripts and, dearest of readers, <a href="https://css-tricks.com/aint-no-party-like-a-third-party/">you should avoid them altogether</a>. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I started to bundle all of my essays up into pure HTML. Inject the CSS into them, save it as a .html file, and make sure that even if I change build processes nothing can ever really break (like there’s no dependencies on some weird markdown plugin only available through the Liquid templating language or some such thing I’ll forget in 5 years).</p>
<p>The way that this essay has slowly regressed over the years isn’t something I lament though. Sure, it’s a bit embarrassing maybe, but it’s also a sign of something important: all websites want to be HTML. Regardless of all the complexity, the kick-flip JavaScript you write, or the fancy fonts you throw in there, eventually all that stuff will fade away.</p>
<p>Eventually, if we’re lucky, only the HTML will be left.</p>
<p>The lesson here (I think) is that this is the fate of all websites. If it’s not link rot that gets you then it’s this heat death of the universe problem with entropy setting in slowly over time. And the only way to really defend against it is to build things progressively, to make sure that you’re not tied to one dependency or another. That complex build process? That’s a dependency. Your third party link to some third party font service that depends on their servers running forever? Another dependency.</p>
<p>Thankfully, because of the way the web was built, these dependencies don’t have to end up in absolute failure. Like, the fact that a website I made back in 2016 still exists at all is a complete wonder. But it’s also kinda funny to me that the thing that lasts longest with our websites is probably the part that we spend the least time thinking about—the markup. We spend so long on the animations and the cool grid CSS layout and ultimately all that will slip away (unless you are extremely careful about how you build your website which, dearest of readers, you are absolutely not ever careful enough).</p>
<p>This is the second law of thermodynamics made clear on the web: the entropy of any isolated system always increases and, at some point or another, all that’s left of a website is the markup.</p>
Home Sweet Homepage2022-04-15T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/home-sweet-homepage/<p>The other day Amy Wibowo wrote <a href="https://sailorhg.com/home_sweet_homepage/">this wondrous, illustrated essay about personal websites</a> where she describes her growing up with the early web and how she got started:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I want my website to be interesting and useful, but how?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>How indeed! Amy’s enthusiasm for everything about the web, including simple ol’ HTML itself, is life-giving stuff:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m not sure what the future will bring, but right now it feels like a blank HTML file: full of possibility.</p>
</blockquote>
Everything I Know About Life I Learned from Powerpoint2022-04-14T16:20:03Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/everything-i-know-about-life-i-learned-from-powerpoint/<p>A while back I read Russell Davies’s excellent Everything I Know About Life I Learned from Powerpoint. It’s not really _just_ about learning how to make slide decks because extreme yawn. Instead, it’s a book about how to write well, how to structure your ideas, how to edit, and how to be light on your feet. It’s real good and I highly recommend it.</p>
<p>But one of my favorite bits of advice, which I feel like it applies to every writer and not just folks writing slide decks, is the bit where Russell talks about removing titles from your slide decks. Just don’t do it, he says. A title is a distraction, a preamble to your idea. Just have a single sentence on your slide without the waffling.</p>
<p>Over the years I’ve seen a lot of bad slides and I think this is the most common problem I see: folks try to treat a slide like a book or a magazine spread. They add lists and tables and headings, subsections and bolded bits and italicized items. Russell’s suggestion feels punk to me then: just treat a slide like a slide. You can have a slide with a standalone, blunt idea and then move onto the next, and the next.</p>
<p>This is why I’m such <a href="https://buttondown.email/robinrendle/archive/sequential-websites/">a fan of sequential websites</a>. They’re basically powerpoint slides, with each webpage containing a single idea and nothing more. And because of this constraint you have to whittle things down to the bare minimum, you have to zoom in on a single paragraph and ask yourself if it’s good enough to just sit there taking up a whole page. Will this sentence embarrass itself if it’s left alone out there in all that white space? Is this sentence worthy?</p>
<p>These kinds of websites are perfect for focusing on the details, for making you your least rambly self.</p>
Ego and Design2022-03-29T15:45:13Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/ego-and-design/<p>I see this all the time in design circles: a lot of folks tend to think their work must be vital in order for it to be good. Their ego demands that they wake up every day and change the world before lunch. (Hello, it is me).</p>
<p>I feel like this is why designers and engineers constantly feel burnt out. They’re putting themselves under all this pressure because they must prove their worth with how fast and hard they type. But hey: the things you type on your keyboard do not make you more valuable as a human person. Everyday we’re bombarded with folks bragging about how they’re changing the world, so in order to prove it to ourselves and everyone around us that we’re a hero, we work ourselves down to the bone. We type like hell and hope that the typing will make us heroes.</p>
<p>But design work is so much healthier/better when you stop telling yourself that you’re changing lives. Websites can just be…websites! And your front end framework or side project doesn’t need to reshape human civilization for it to be worth while.</p>
<p>Once you relieve yourself of that pressure it’s so much easier to be happy and to do good, useful work.</p>
<p>(I am still struggling with this, leave me alone.)</p>
Black Mesa2022-03-19T20:26:06Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/black-mesa/<p>I’m obsessed with this <a href="https://youtu.be/G_TcAxAKCAI">documentary about Black Mesa</a>, a game developed by the Crowbar Collective which is a HD copy of, and a lover letter to, Half Life. It’s a fascinating series of interviews because even if you don’t give two hoots about that videogame series, everyone on the team is clearly in love with the original. But! They also see Half Life’s flaws, too; the weird last level, the iffy dialogue, the prolonged boring sections that aren’t fun.</p>
<p>22 years after Half Life came out, the team looks extremely closely at their favorite game and then they cut big chunks out or move things around to make it more obvious what to do and when. They also talk about tons of game design principles that I’ve never heard of, like:</p>
<ol>
<li>Introduce a new thing/mechanic/idea</li>
<li>Let you safely use it the first time round</li>
<li>Test your knowledge to make sure you’ve learned it</li>
<li>Introduce a fun twist on that mechanic</li>
</ol>
<p>Step 4 is a lot more difficult than step 2, when you use the mechanic for the first time (like, say, a boost jump or a new weapon). But because they’ve introduced these mechanics slowly then you eventually become an expert by the end. Also, because you’ve gone through this process, you <em>feel</em> smarter, as if you’ve overcome a real challenge.</p>
<p>And there’s no popups! No big explainy tutorials or markers on screen that get in your way. That also makes it feel as if <em>you’ve</em> overcome the challenge and not just pressed the buttons the game expected you to.</p>
<p>One thing I realize as I’m playing Horizon Forbidden West now is that because there’s so many markers telling me where to go or what to see then I’m basically in autopilot as I play; I’m not really thinking. I’m not linking new abilities together, I’m not pushing back or experimenting. The game tells me what to do and I do it.</p>
<p>Anyway, I wonder how this ties into my day job. How do I design websites more like Half Life?</p>
Thanks Doc2022-03-17T05:18:11Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/thanks-doc/<p>A couple of months back, <a href="https://craigmod.com/">Craig</a> mentioned in a video that he has a doc filled to the brim with snippets of text—nice words, compliments, and thanks that had been sent his way for his work. Whenever someone says something nice he just copy/pastes it into that doc.</p>
<p>It sounds silly at first and perhaps a little egotistical. Behold! I have a document that proves how great I am!</p>
<p>But I started doing it just to see what it feels like and...hey...actually? It’s so great! When I’m feeling low (often) or whenever the world feels unstable (extremely often) it’s so very nice to return to a few kind words about my work. It reminds me just how much these words of praise mean, it reminds me that I ought to pass that favor along.</p>
<p>I should say thank you! you’re amazing! great job! more often because returning to these compliments is always a bulwark against apathy.</p>
An Ode to CSS-Tricks2022-03-15T15:48:16Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/an-ode-to-css-tricks/<p>Big news! <a href="https://css-tricks.com/css-tricks-is-joining-digitalocean/">Hot off the press</a>, Chris writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>CSS-Tricks, this very website you’re looking at, has been acquired by DigitalOcean!</p>
<p>[...] I will be working with the DigitalOcean team as an advisor as we transition CSS-Tricks to DigitalOcean’s management, and will then step back to focus on my other projects.</p>
<p>[...] The site and content is staying right here. DigitalOcean is committed to continuing to produce high-quality content on front-end development and tending to the trove of content that exists here already.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’ve already said goodbye in this week’s newsletter, but I think it’s the right time to celebrate CSS-Tricks and everything that Chris has done for the web community over the years. Because I can’t think of another website that I’ve grown up with that’s continued to be such an important part of my life.</p>
<p>Whenever I’ve been stuck on a front-end problem or whenever I hit a snag with something, there is an almost 100% chance that Chris would’ve already written about the problem and the 18 different solutions to it. Or the answer would’ve been found in one of CSS-Tricks’ enormous and highly detailed guides. But solving my front-end problems has only been one way in which CSS-Tricks is important.</p>
<p>Chris has always been a mentor. Not just to me, but I think pretty much everyone working on the web these days. Not only is he fabulous writer that makes me mad with jealousy—to the point, funny, never taking the easy way out—Chris also showed me how to be a person on the internet. Don’t get into dumb fights. Treat people with respect. Kindness is the most important thing, etc. He built the team around CSS-Tricks and was always honorable, always did the right thing. If I ever end up running my own company or becoming a manager I’ll ask myself the same question every day:</p>
<p>“What would Chris Coyier do?”</p>
<p>I’ve been real lucky to contribute to CSS-Tricks over the years. Chris was the first person to give me a shot and back in 2014 when he began looking for writers on Twitter, I sent a gushing email which went something like: OMG OMG OMG OMG. I’m sure that email is now horrendously embarrassing and so I refuse to go find it but it got me my first writing gig. And over the years I learned so much about writing and publishing by working on the site; how to research something, how to get to the point right away, and how to not be lazy. Show examples! Cut out the dry stuff! Add a weird joke! Later though, when we started publishing the newsletter, it was the first beat I ever had. Writing those posts each week was difficult sometimes but it always a little exciting.</p>
<p>CSS-Tricks had an enormous impact on what kind of work I do, it gave shape to my twenties and my early thirties (yikes!) and I am endlessly thankful for the opportunity. So I’m excited to see what DigitalOcean does with CSS-Tricks, as Chris will still be working as an advisor. The ship is in safe hands.</p>
<p>But! I’m also excited about what this opens up for me. The newsletter was basically my whole Sunday for years and years and so now I hope to keep that ritual up but focus it on other efforts. First off, by writing my own fledgling newsletter but also because I get to stand on my own two feet now. I won’t have the prestige of CSS-Tricks in the ol’ bio and I won’t have any laurels to rest on. I think that’s good! It’ll make me terrified which will subsequently force me to try something new and different and punk rock and maybe also bad. But dangit, bad is the bit before it gets good.</p>
<p>Anyway, thanks so very much for everything Chris. Thanks to all the writers and contributors, thanks to <a href="https://geoffgraham.me/">Geoff</a> for editing everything, thanks to <a href="https://sarahdrasnerdesign.com/">Sarah</a>, and <a href="https://www.miriamsuzanne.com/">Miriam</a> and thanks to everyone who has contributed to CSS-Tricks over the years. Oh! And thanks to everyone I’ve ever linked to.</p>
<p>Your work has made me a better writer, sure, but also (I hope) a better person, too.</p>
36 Days of Type2022-03-13T12:16:09Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/36-days-of-type/<p>Lovely work from Alisa Burzic here called <a href="https://twitter.com/burzic_alisa/status/1502907342144548866">36 Days of Type</a>; once a day she makes a beautiful letter and although right now it’s just a bunch of tweets, it would be so cool to see <a href="https://twitter.com/burzic_alisa/status/1500823324389163018">each</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/burzic_alisa/status/1501199799097376770">of</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/burzic_alisa/status/1501513430662107136">these</a> in a big scrolly website. Each of these letterforms are weird alien fun.</p>
<p>Oh! I didn’t realize that this was like the 100 day projects I see on the web every once in a while. Lots of folks are making their own letters and each of them are <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/36daysoftype?src=hashtag_click">bananas</a>.</p>
The Sound I Left Behind2022-03-06T20:00:02Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-sound-i-left-behind/<p>The British countryside is all violins and pianos and I have my proof; just look out there. The train from Plymouth to Paddington is quiet but then I have two more trains—those completely unfamiliar to me—before reaching my top secret, undisclosed location. For now we’re zipping along the hedgerows as we speed out of the city centre and the place I called home for 25 years.</p>
<p>I’m transfixed to the window; out there is a bumpy landscape that rolls and twists out of view.</p>
<p>For some reason I can’t listen to anything upbeat on the way though and it’s here that I realize that the landscape requires a certain kind of music. It’s almost like this landscape doesn’t take kindly to bass guitar or drums at all. Instead, it requires quiet, prolonged strings all the way. Even behind glass this country looks like it’s been stretched out across an old wooden frame—a violin of leafless, twisted branches, a Steinway of dilapidated barns, a flute of clueless sheep, a Yamaha of starlings, a Roland Kiyola KF-10 KW of crows. It’s all a choir of strings and soft piano keys and distant chords played slowly.</p>
<p>I see this place with foreign eyes now. After three years of not stepping foot on home soil, some things have become clearer—more focused, obvious now—and other things have become harder to see. For example, returning to Plymouth I felt like I could breathe for the first time in days, as I forgot how London feels stodgy, the air thick with exhaust fumes. I forgot the biting cold air and I forgot the wealth of accents and slang and twists of the tongue.</p>
<p>“Go on, lad. Take one!” I hear someone say on the seat behind me and I think to myself, ah yes this is the sound I left behind.</p>
Draft no.42022-03-06T08:19:29Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/draft-no-4/<p>John McPhee <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/draft-no-4">on writer’s block</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You are writing, say, about a grizzly bear. No words are forthcoming. For six, seven, ten hours no words have been forthcoming. You are blocked, frustrated, in despair. You are nowhere, and that’s where you’ve been getting. What do you do? You write, ‘Dear Mother.’ And then you tell your mother about the block, the frustration, the ineptitude, the despair. You insist that you are not cut out to do this kind of work. You whine. You whimper. You outline your problem, and you mention that the bear has a fifty-five-inch waist and a neck more than thirty inches around but could run nose-to-nose with Secretariat. You say the bear prefers to lie down and rest. The bear rests fourteen hours a day. And you go on like that as long as you can. And then you go back and delete the ‘Dear Mother’ and all the whimpering and whining, and just keep the bear.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And on the subject of dictionaries later in the piece:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the search for words, thesauruses are useful things, but they don’t talk about the words they list. They are also dangerous. They can lead you to choose a polysyllabic and fuzzy word when a simple and clear one is better. The value of a thesaurus is not to make a writer seem to have a vast vocabulary of recondite words. The value of a thesaurus is in the assistance it can give you in finding the best possible word for the mission that the word is supposed to fulfill. Writing teachers and journalism courses have been known to compare them to crutches and to imply that no writer of any character or competence would use them. At best, thesauruses are mere rest stops in the search for the mot juste. Your destination is the dictionary.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I wouldn’t say I get writer’s block, but I do sometimes get subject block when I try to force myself to write a Big and Important Thing. Although, I do love this idea very much: write to your mother and complain about the subject.</p>
<p>Then remove all the complaints at the end.</p>
Two Years of Mass-Driver2022-03-03T08:09:11Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/two-years-of-mass-driver/<p>Rutherford Craze breaks down <a href="https://mass-driver.com/article/two-years-of-mass-driver-with-graphs">the last two years of Mass-Driver</a>, the type foundry he started back in 2020:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When I started Mass-Driver, I wasn’t certain whether the studio would still be around in 2022. I was hopeful, perhaps even confident, but still not completely sure I’d be able to make it work — so I’m extremely happy to say that today, the foundry is not just sustainable but (slightly) profitable. I’m really excited to see what the next two years hold: not just new typefaces and collaborations, but also the resources and time to focus even more on usability, language support, and production quality for typefaces.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s super interesting to read about all this, both from the type design point of view but also the publishing side as well. For example, by using <a href="https://www.futurefonts.xyz/mass-driver">Future Fonts</a> to help kick start his excellent font publishing run—which now consists of <a href="https://mass-driver.com/">a lot of lovely work</a>—he has his own independent foundry and yet can also start getting paid for projects really early in the development of things. That’s exciting to me!</p>
The Parthenon Sculptures2022-03-02T05:52:48Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-parthenon-sculptures/<p>Today we saw <a href="https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/british-museum-story/contested-objects-collection/parthenon-sculptures">the Parthenon Sculptures</a> in the British Museum in London. They are beautiful; 6000 year old marble panels which tell a comic book story of a Greek mythological war between Centaurs and Lapiths, with the gods watching from the stands.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/img_9126-1.jpg" alt="A photograph of the Parthenon Sculptures" /></p>
<p>The British Museum is a difficult place to be, this room especially. You’re aware at all times that a theft took place and the spoils are on display. Standing in this breathtaking room, a genuine wonder of human engineering before you, yet you can’t really enjoy the experience. If you know how these handsome marble sculptures found their way to London and why they are on display here, then you cannot feel anything but anger.</p>
<p>The marbles were stolen from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenon">Parthenon</a> in 1803 by Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, in order to pay off his debts—and even this he screwed up, as he didn’t get back the money it took to steal them. Since then, the British Museum tends to describe the marbles as if they were rescued by a crack team of scientists under laboratory conditions, saviors of a national treasure, and not by a bunch of debt-riddled goons who then struggled to sell them off once they returned to London.</p>
<p>Of course, the museum would be thrilled to loan the marbles back to Greece if only they asked...</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Trustees will consider any loan request for any part of the collection (subject to all our normal loan conditions). Successive Greek governments have refused to acknowledge the Trustees' title to the Parthenon Sculptures.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>How insulting is this? Hey, we stole a national treasure—the first marvel of a democratic society—and now you can borrow them whenever you want. Of course they’ve never asked to borrow a treasure that you stole.</p>
<p>Underlying all this language is something especially British in its xenophobia and patronizing tone. The British want to take credit for displaying the finest example of Western art and engineering and yet cannot trust Greece to take care of their own history (despite the Acropolis Museum in Athens being more than capable).</p>
<p>Setting all of this aside, the fact that these marbles are separated—some in London, some in Athens—is tragedy enough. As <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2009/07/hitchens200907">Christopher Hitchens wrote</a> more than a decade ago:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If the Mona Lisa had been sawed in two during the Napoleonic Wars and the separated halves had been acquired by different museums in, say, St. Petersburg and Lisbon, would there not be a general wish to see what they might look like if re-united? If you think my analogy is overdrawn, consider this: the body of the goddess Iris is at present in London, while her head is in Athens. The front part of the torso of Poseidon is in London, and the rear part is in Athens. And so on. This is grotesque.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Despite this beautiful room I’m standing in right now it feels wrong that this half is on display so far from home. It’s a crime that they’re separated, and the cruelty is made clear by how easy it would be to undo and make right.</p>
<p>If only we gave them back.</p>
An incoherent rant about design systems2022-02-28T05:33:40Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/an-incoherent-rant-about-design-systems/<p>No matter how fancy your Figma file is or how beautiful and lovingly well organized that Storybook documentation is; the front-end is always your source of truth. You can hate it as much as you like—all those weird buttons, variables, inaccessible form inputs—but that right there is your design system.</p>
<p>You can’t cherry pick what is and isn’t your design system just because it might make you feel icky inside. Why? If we can’t look at the thing clearly, or if we pretend it’s better than it is, then we’ll never fix the tech debt, the inaccessibility problems, or the confusion that haunts engineers and designers every day.</p>
<p>Sometimes this is tough because a lot of folks don’t want to acknowledge how bad the design system is. It feels like you’re throwing the engineers and designers under the bus or it sounds cynical. You’re insulting all that hard work that went into this...ahem...“system”.</p>
<p>Anyway, the front-end is the source of truth. All of the front-end. The component library you have divvied up into neat little buckets but also the rest of the app. Your design system is the eight inconsistent select inputs.</p>
<p>So being honest about this is the first step to fixing it.</p>
<p>But wait, if designers are looking at Figma or Sketch all day, then isn’t Figma the design system? Shouldn’t our design system be <em>aspirational</em>, <em>delightful</em>?</p>
<p>Nope! Screw delight. The delightful part of any design system is simply the lack of confusion, the ease of use. And pretending that Figma is the source of truth is only going to add to the confusion. I’ve worked with folks who want the design system in Figma to be this beautiful, aspirational thing. They want it to be the shining city on the hill, the place that engineers can one day hope to build. “What if our buttons looked like this? What if our imaginations were let loose and we used font-weights like that?”</p>
<p>Great. But now I’m confused as hell. What are the font-sizes of a tables? What icons should I be using? What’s actually available in the front-end for my engineers to take and run with? What do they have to build from scratch?</p>
<p>Here’s my advice: take all that aspirational stuff out of your Figma design system file. Put it somewhere else. Your Figma docs should be a mirror of the front-end (because that’s really the source of truth) and when an update is made then you should update Figma immediately after the fact.</p>
<p>Look. I don’t want to go into Figma and try to parse what is and isn’t usable right now. Like when I’m driving a car, I don’t want a button that is <em>aspirationally</em> useful. I want a button that works when I click it. I want to drag and drop in a component and then an engineer see that and know that it’s available in Storybook under the same name as it was in Figma.</p>
<p>But this is hard! You may be refactoring buttons, icons, and all sorts of other great things in the front-end all the time, but if you don’t spend just as much time in Figma making sure everything is correctly documented then you could cause things to be out of sync, and more confusion will appear.</p>
<p>But Figma will <em>always</em> be out of sync with the front-end and that’s okay. We have to pick and choose which parts of the front-end we should make a mirror-image of. Do we need all the form styles? Nah, just what most designers need each day to get their work done.</p>
<p>The hard truth is this; your Figma docs should be treated like a sketch on the back of a napkin. It should be <em>somewhat</em> accurate but it’s a tool that reflects the front-end, but: it ain’t your design system.</p>
Return2022-02-27T11:53:38Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/return/<p>Was it three years or four? It feels like a decade since I was last here. But today, here I am. Here we are.</p>
<p>The UK.</p>
<p>We are sniffly and dry and exhausted. Neither of us slept on the plane and I made the mistake of watching Dead Poet’s Society and weeping for the last hour of the flight. God that film rules. If ever there is a thing you need to explain, like, my whole deal, then that’s it.</p>
<p>Delirious in London again. Excited to get to the hotel and fight my partner to the death for a warm shower and then for the coziest side of the bed.</p>
<p>We’re here for two weeks. First, a gallop around London for a few days and then down to Plymouth to see my family. After that?</p>
<p>Paris.</p>
Webster’s 1913 2022-02-21T21:35:33Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/webster%E2%80%99s-1913/<p>After reading <a href="https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary">James’ rant about dictionaries</a> yesterday it was clear that <em>Webster’s</em> is the best of the lot; poetic, romantic, playful. It’s more than a dictionary, really. But after looking for an old copy I just couldn’t find a half decent one anywhere. That is, until <a href="https://lucybellwood.com/">Lucy</a> found <a href="https://www.websters1913.com/">Webster’s 1913</a> and sent it my way because, quite frankly, it is the perfect website; great typesetting, fast, ad-free, no nonsense.</p>
<p>Why is Webster’s the best dictionary though? Well, as Somers wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You can see why it became cliché to start a speech with “Webster’s defines X as…”: with his dictionary the definition that followed was actually likely to lend gravitas to your remarks, to sound so good, in fact, that it’d beat anything you could come up with on your own.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Just take this definition, from Webster’s, of the word <a href="https://www.websters1913.com/words/Powerful">“powerful”</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Full of power; capable of producing great effects of any kind; potent; mighty; efficacious; intense; as, a powerful man or beast; a powerful engine; a powerful argument; a powerful light; a powerful vessel.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Efficacious! It feels like this dang dictionary is trying to date me, to woo me off my chair. Like, check out <a href="https://www.websters1913.com/words/Despair">“despair”</a>, too:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Loss of hope; utter hopelessness; complete despondency.</p>
<p><em>We in dark dreams are tossing to and fro,<br />
Pine with regret, or sicken with despair.</em><br />
— Keble</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What! That’s a heck of a quote. It feels like someone sat at their desk and really considered what “despair” means and then they poured over their books to find the perfect quote to match. So! This website is my new favorite writing tool. Whenever I get stuck or whenever I want to switch out a word for another, I’m going to use Webster’s 1913 and see where it leads me.</p>
<p>Compare <em>Webster’s</em> to the robotron-like entries of the <em>New Oxford American Dictionary</em> that comes bundled with macOS. Like this one, for “power”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...having great power or strength: a fast, powerful car | computers are now more compact and powerful.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Well, okay! That’s certainly a less playful and less useful description though. It <em>defines</em> the word, sure, but it doesn’t encourage remixing or adding to the definition. And it certainly doesn’t push me to come up with something better. It sorta feels like a literary dead end.</p>
<p>Webster’s, on the other hand, feels like eleven doors open up when you look for the definition of a word you already know the meaning to, like “favor”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>To regard with kindness; to support; to aid, or to have the disposition to aid, or to wish success to; to be propitious to; to countenance; to treat with consideration or tenderness; to show partiality or unfair bias towards.</p>
<p><em>O happy youth! and favored of the skies.</em> — Pope</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Favored of the skies! Holy shit. What a way to “favor” a thing. Excellent favoring. Truly, my <em>favorite</em> website.</p>
You’re probably using the wrong dictionary2022-02-20T22:55:39Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/you%E2%80%99re-probably-using-the-wrong-dictionary/<p>Back in ye olde 2014, James Somers wrote about dictionaries and his particular fancy for Webster’s. However! James argues that dictionaries are not tools for showing you what words mean, but instead can be used as <a href="https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary">prompts for better writing</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Notice, too, how much less certain the Webster definition seems about itself, even though it’s more complete — as if to remind you that the word came first, that the word isn’t defined by its definition here, in this humble dictionary, that definitions grasp, tentatively, at words, but that what words really are is this haze and halo of associations and evocations, a little networked cloud of uses and contexts.</p>
<p>What I mean is that with its blunt authority the New Oxford definition of “pathos” — “a quality that evokes pity or sadness” — shuts down the conversation, it shuts down your thinking about the word, while the Webster’s version gets your wheels turning: it seems so much more provisional — “that which awakens tender emotions, such as pity, sorrow, and the like; contagious warmth of feeling, action, or expression; pathetic quality; as, the pathos of a picture, of a poem, or of a cry” — and therefore alive.</p>
<p>Most important, it describes a word worth using: a mere six letters that have come to stand for something huge, for a complex meta-emotion with mythic roots. Such is the power of actual English.</p>
</blockquote>
The Sandwich2022-02-17T02:34:45Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-sandwich/<p>“So I sat there,” he said.</p>
<p>“And I thought to myself, ya know, ‘ruthless honesty’ and all that. This guy sold me a terrible sandwich and I’m going to tell him just how terrible it was. But then he was upset when I told him! He made this shitty, awful sandwich—which I paid money for—and when he asked me how it was, what was I supposed to tell him? What did he think I was going to say! I said it was just awful. The worst sandwich I’ve ever had. He got upset! So I told him, if you don’t want the truth—don’t ask.”</p>
<p>A long pause. No one laughed. Someone eventually coughed. I tried to imagine what the weaver of this intricate, melancholy tale expected from this little group, all of us looking into our cameras and illumatined in a soft blue. Did they expect us all to laugh? Or for everyone on the video call to slam the poor shop owner and belittle that sandwich, too? Maybe this Sandwich Cicero imagined we were going to be impressed by their high standards? Or the sheer courage they had to look someone in the eye and tell them, and their bad sandwich, to fuck right off.</p>
<p>No one, I must say, was impressed.</p>
<p>For months I’ve thought about this conversation, and all the ways I might’ve been small and petty like them. It’s such an insignificant thing to point at, or write about, but these little acts of meanness are no less painful because they’re common. But to then brag about the story afterwards?</p>
<p>Sweet, I must say, <em>Christ</em>.</p>
<p>But it’s the kind of cruelty that we let go. It’s really difficult to confront shitty, toxic behavior like this because 1. the person will absolutely not change whatsoever and 2. to even comment on a story like this seems like a waste of time.</p>
<p>Yet it’s these small details, all these mean quirks, these are the things to watch out for in other people and also in ourselves. Because I believe deep down in my gut that intelligence isn’t enough. I really don’t care how well we know flexbox or how many beautiful typefaces we’ve made, because if we’re an asshole then that’s the ballgame.</p>
<p>We don’t have license to be an enormous, raging bastard if we’re smart, or if we’re good enough at our job, or even if we’re rich. Here in the Bay Area tech scene, I think that this the worst thing people took from a certain bespectacled, turtle-necked gentleman—they don’t quite get that he was good at his job <em>despite</em> being an absolute bastard. But we can all aspire to be better than the turtle neck guy.</p>
<p>Because here’s the thing that’s impossible to teach (and extremely difficult to learn): <em>kindness</em> is the only form of intelligence that really counts.</p>
Promotion2022-02-04T21:39:55Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/promotion/<p>Last week I was promoted to Senior Product Designer and so I should feel safe in the knowledge that, yes, I am doing good work. I am on track. Success. <em>Next</em>.</p>
<p>But I can’t celebrate just yet because all I see are my flaws; the half-baked ideas and sketches, the designs that went nowhere, the rambling and incoherent thoughts in docs and Figjams and notepads. The bad writing. The problems I’ve caused in our interface. Oh, the problems!</p>
<p>There is just so much work left to do, so many skills that require more time and discipline.</p>
<p>Perhaps I’m being too critical of myself though. And I guess that has something to do with meeting countless Senior Product Designers in the past who are not worthy of the title. Our field is full of quasi-famous twitter folk with nothing to show for it and there’s so many kids fresh out of college who are Principal Designer or the Head of Design, blessed with attention and eyeballs and hauling unimaginably tall mountains of cash behind them. But when you get down to it, when you sit with them and ask them how something works or try to get their attention for even a moment, they baulk. They can’t focus, they’re not in the room to make decisions or push things forward. They want calendar invites and meeting after meeting after meeting...</p>
<p>Because of this experience, I’m deeply cynical about titles of any kind. So I guess I feel somehow beyond, and also don’t feel worthy of, the title “senior product designer.” I mean, c’mon, I’m 31 years old! How the hell can I be a senior anything at this point in my life? If I was chef in the restaurant of <em>Jiro Dreams of Sushi</em> then I would have just progressed to the stage where I’m only now allowed to hold the eggs.</p>
<p>But I am scared of the eggs! I am <em>terrified</em> of the eggs!</p>
I Trawl the Megahertz2022-02-04T21:22:11Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/i-trawl-the-megahertz/<p>Tell the stars I’m coming, <br /><br />
Make them leave a space for me.</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/R9982wYPPm0" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
The difference between correct-ness and useful-ness in a design system2022-02-01T07:36:02Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-difference-between-correct-ness-and-useful-ness-in-a-design-system/<p>When it comes to drawing a design system in Figma or Sketch or what have you, there’s a question we have to ask ourselves all the time: what should we document? And what should we leave out?</p>
<p>So we want to have our icons and colors in there, right? We don’t want to keep remaking those over and over again. Oh and we definitely want buttons and form components, too. That’s a no brainer. I guess we want our modals and our main layout or page designs with all the navigation and what not. Definitely don’t want to have to keep doing that either.</p>
<p>But at some point it gets tricky to decide what should be in the Figma library vs. what should be in something that lives in Storybook. Do we put all our guides about how to use these components in Figma? Or what about the does and dont’s? What about props and component names—do we follow precisely what’s in Storybook even if it’s bad or something we’re embarrassed by?</p>
<p>When documenting a design system the goal is clear communication and efficiency. We don’t want designers to open up Figma and then ask “what do our popovers look like?” and then have to go into the app to find out. They don’t want to go into Figma and find a component called Pagination and then be told by a developer there is no such thing, that it’s the infamously named NumberedFlorpfSwitcher.</p>
<p>You can’t put your entire design system in <a href="https://storybook.js.org/">Storybook</a> because that’s not where most of the design work happens. So we have to make a decision: use Pagination and be correct for the future once we fix it or live with the horrid NumberedFlorpfSwitcher?</p>
<p>The second option is always better in my opinion. Not because it’s the most correct, but because it’s the most useful.</p>
<p>Let me explain.</p>
<p>Sometimes you need to make concessions or create Figma components that just don’t exist in the front-end at all and are instead useful tools for the team just to get shit done. For example: a state prop on a Button component with hover, focus, active, and disabled. Now, in the <code><Button></code> component all those things are not part of the state React prop, and so isn’t it more correct to document the component in Storybook precisely?</p>
<p>I’d say no, even though it’s more correct.</p>
<p>Because this is the true challenge of design systems work: the difference between correct-ness and useful-ness. We could document everything—every disabled button hover state and every possible combination of components—within Figma. We could name them precisely as we do in the front-end. That’s correct-ness. I see a ton of design systems within Figma that are desperately trying to be correct. But if we want our design system to be <em>useful</em> to our team then we need to cut things out. We really don’t need everything in Figma, only what will speed us up as designers.</p>
<p>Here’s another example: in the Sentry design system in Figma I made an Avatar component. All it does is let you choose between user, organization, and team icons. Now does a component like that exist in the front-end? Nope. It’s a bit bonkers down there right now. But it saves me so much time when doing design so that I don’t have to import 3 separate icons to make 1 simple table.</p>
<p>So: clear communication and efficiency. They’re the two qualities of a design system that we have to constantly keep in balance. And if we put too much focus on one end of that spectrum then we might neglect the other in the process.</p>
<p>If we want to be correct, okay, let’s have components of everything and an enormous Figma library of stuff we need to maintain. But if we want to be useful to designers who want to get an understanding of the system, let’s be brief. No designer will ever need the hover state of a disabled button and if we want to do an audit then we should absolutely do that in the front-end, not within Figma. Stuff changes too much to ever expect 100% correctness within Figma.</p>
<p>So we gotta be useful instead.</p>
Like Clockwork2022-01-14T03:22:39Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/like-clockwork/<p>A clock arrived one day at our door. A special clock. But the mechanism inside had failed in some way. We checked the batteries, examined the little gears, everything looked fine. But no tick, no tock. The clock was busted.</p>
<p>After ten minutes trying to figure the dumb thing out, I left. But returning to the living room an hour later, there she was; C, surrounded by tiny gears and batteries and screw drivers. A video was screaming at her about how to repair clocks and she had the largest grin on her face I’ve ever seen.</p>
<p>She had fixed the tiny motor inside.</p>
<hr />
<p>It’s one of many things I love about C.</p>
<p>She views the world as incomplete. Not in a cynical or mean way, but rather, well, she’s always fixing things, always improving them. There is work to be done! C is a great force, a little combustible engine of focus and care and love on the smallest of scales; she physically cannot sit still without fixing something nearby. And whilst a great wave of despair consumes me where I’m basically useless for days or weeks thereafter, C is always sat somewhere nearby, mending things.</p>
<p>Likewise, I’ve been known to brag about the slightest kindness (oh my god! I saved an old lady who got stuck in a BART door! I am a hero!), but days after the fact she’ll casually tell me that she spent an hour fixing her patient’s hair. Unknotting it, carefully unweaving it, so that this complete stranger who she’ll never see again can feel human in an inhuman place.</p>
<p>Constructing puzzles, repairing something in the house, building a small botanical garden, learning how to fix a typewriter. There is always something worthy of C’s attention, always something worthy of her fixing.</p>
British & Exotic Mineralogy2022-01-11T03:23:10Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/british-exotic-mineralogy/<p>My goodness, <a href="https://c82.net/mineralogy/">what a website this is</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All 2,242 illustrations from James Sowerby’s compendium of knowledge about mineralogy in Great Britain and beyond, drawn 1802–1817 and arranged by color.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m unfamiliar with Nicholas Rougeaux’s work but this is truly a lovely website. He reconstructed the source material from the Internet Archive and then fixed a ton of problems with the composite images. I can only imagine the mountain of work this all was. But—there are others, too! After a bit of clicking around on his website, I found that Nicholas has worked on similar projects in the past. One is called <a href="https://c82.net/twining/">Illustrations of the Natural Orders of Plants</a> and another that stood out to me was <a href="https://c82.net/werner/">Werner’s<br />
Nomenclature of Colours</a>—each of them are wondrous.</p>
<p>I’m now sat in my kitchen, in the dark, deliriously reading <a href="https://c82.net/blog/?id=84">how he made this website</a>. It’s all so upsettingly good. Ugh.</p>
Escape2022-01-09T23:51:06Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/home/<p>The light is perfect today; the sky a glacial blue, the sun setting off to the left. On the hill just over there, layers upon layers of houses like a great slanting and disorganized cake. I watch them everyday. When I wake up they’re quiet, hazy, somewhat-blue, and then at night they’re buzzing with electricity. Also, thanks to this hill of hodge podge homes, we’re protected from the harshest weather the peninsula has to offer.</p>
<p>The hill over there is a random assortment of everything; homes both quaint and small, or enormous and violent green with stripes of mahogany red. There’s a dash of fertile green up against the wild strokes of graffiti. There are balconies and tiny windows, solar panels, and platforms. In between all this pure chaos, there’s a handful of minimal-esque mansions spread about with their absolute conformity to square shapes and bright, white paint. One home that sits just in front of a square white mansion happens to be a dazzling, neon colored structure with everything out of place. Both of them feel like the punk-rock alternative to the other.</p>
<p>It’s in these moments—watching California bask its inhabitants with golden amber light—that I feel like I’ve escaped Plymouth, my hometown back in the UK. Through mostly luck (and perhaps a tiny, almost insignificant amount of skill) I have somehow teleported myself here and into a quiet dimension of clumsy homes with glacial blues enveloping them all. I’ve escaped the poverty and the sadness and the no-future-present of that other place. I’ve escaped the language and the clouds and, well, I’ve escaped my family, too.</p>
<p>Huh. An enormous bubble just appeared in front of one of the houses over there. Up and up this bubble floats until—pop!—nothing. I assume there’s a garden, hidden behind all the layers of homes stacked on top of one another, and children are playing in it. Or perhaps a whole family of bubblists have found their true calling.</p>
<p>More bubbles! Dozens more in fact, but smaller now, hover above the houses on the hill. It’s a cornucopia of bubbles over there, a utopia of bubbles, bubbles galore. They churn and warp in the breeze and then, in a beat, they’re gone.</p>
My anti-resume2021-12-31T22:17:29Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/my-anti-resume/<p>Monica Byrne made <a href="https://monicacatherine.com/2013/08/19/my-anti-resume/">an anti-resume</a> way back in 2013—it’s a spreadsheet that lists all her publishing failures and puts her success into context. This is a cool and punk-rock idea! It reminds me of Kat Huang’s <a href="https://www.katmh.com/fail/">Failure Resume</a> that I spotted just earlier today.</p>
<p>Anyway, the conclusion Monica gets to is what’s the most interesting thing to me:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The overall lesson is this—and it’s not necessarily how I think the world should be, or wish the world would be. It’s purely practical: that if you’re a writer, even a very talented and hardworking writer, writing must be its own reward, or you’re going to have a rough time. Recently a friend ask me if my novel publication date now felt like the proverbial apple in the Tantalus myth and immediately I was like, “No, I get the apple every day, because I write every day.”</p>
</blockquote>
Software is a Gift2021-12-30T23:14:33Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/software-is-a-gift/<p>Here’s a real interesting piece about <a href="https://apenwarr.ca/log/20211229">gifts and software</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Not every project on github is the same. Not everyone has the same motivations. Giving them money won't change their motivations. Trying to pay them or regulate them taints the gift. If you wanted to pay someone to fix some software, you didn't want a gift. You wanted a company.</p>
<p>But if there is no company and someone gave you something anyway? Say thanks.</p>
</blockquote>
A New Thing2021-12-30T03:57:55Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/a-new-thing/<p>Today I fixed a few bugs and updated the colors and spacing; the little things, stuff no-one will notice. But dang, it feels so very good to tweak my website and watch 12 hours straight of The Lord of the Rings. It shakes off the cobwebs, awakes something dormant, reminds me that websites don’t require a review or anyone’s permission to do cool and weird stuff.</p>
<p>Speaking of which, I’ve started a new thing: for 2022 and beyond I’ll be writing a newsletter. The All Encompassing Newsletter. The Omni-Newsletter. The Newsletter of Newsletters. You can subscribe below and from here on out this will be the main thing. It’s where I’ll write about CSS and typography and whatever else is floating about in my noggin’ that week.</p>
<p>Don’t fret—things won’t change here. I still want my blog to be a place where I can be sad and happy and flawed, with unedited and sometimes clunky writing that I regret. Instead, this newsletter will be a bit more polished, a bit more official and hopeful and kind.</p>
<p>Although, I’m not sure what I’ll write yet. I want to give it a few weeks and try things out before settling in, so it might be extremely bumpy at the beginning. But the exciting part of all this is that I get to push my writing in a different direction.</p>
<p>So: a new year, a new format, a new thing.</p>
CSS and Momentum2021-12-29T20:58:09Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/css-and-momentum/<p>I reckon 2021 was the best year for CSS since…2015? I haven’t felt this level of excitement and momentum in years.</p>
<p>In the last twelve months <a href="https://css-tricks.com/say-hello-to-css-container-queries/">container queries</a> and <a href="https://www.bram.us/2021/12/21/the-css-has-selector-is-way-more-than-a-parent-selector/">the <code>:has</code> pseudo selector</a> went from a pipe dream to almost-shipping in browsers. My hunch is that these two (along with subgrid) will reshape the way we work as front-end developers in 2022 and will make possible a whole new range of things that aren’t even imaginable today.</p>
<p>Although, the truth here is that CSS doesn’t get better one year, randomly, because people start focusing on it again. Instead it’s the dedicated work of <em>years</em> by the Firefox, Chrome, and Safari teams, as well as everyone that’s part of the working groups who isn’t affiliated with browsers. It’s thanks to the developers, speakers, writers, and contributors across the web that we now have these superpowers.</p>
<p>Anyway, I’m truly excited to see how it’ll all improve in 2022, as Bramus writes <a href="https://www.bram.us/2021/12/27/css-in-2022/">about the near-term future of CSS</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m quite confident the following features will see support across all browsers sometime in 2022. Some features already have support in one or more browsers, with others to follow. Learning one of the following CSS features listed below in 2022 will pay off.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Bramus’s list is so exciting that I reckon this is the best time to get started in web design since 2008 when CSS3 emerged and pushed everything forwards in one giant great leap.</p>
The Future Is Not Only Useless, It’s Expensive2021-12-26T19:26:24Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-future-is-not-only-useless-it%E2%80%99s-expensive/<p><a href="https://www.gawker.com/culture/the-future-is-useless-expensive">Dan Brooks</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This is how NFTs make me feel: like the future is useless but expensive, and world-altering technology is now in the hands of a culture so aesthetically and spiritually impoverished that it should maybe go back to telling stories around the cooking fire for a while, just to remember how to mean something.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is the problem with the <em>aesthetics</em> of this stuff, but Dan also writes about the philosophical problems with it, too. It’s art as pure commerce, solely transactional. NFT tech is not a fun and experimental playground like in the early days of the web, but a cruel and manipulative grift that is ultimately bad for us all.</p>
Care for the Text2021-12-25T00:36:57Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/care-for-the-text/<p>I wrote a lil thing about <a href="https://css-tricks.com/care-for-the-text/">why we should care about writing</a>, even as front-end developers and designers:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>How do you make a great website? Everyone has an answer at the ready: Flashy animations! The latest punk-rock CSS trick! Gradients! Illustrations! Colors to pack a punch! Vite! And, sure, all these things might make a website better. But no matter how fancy the application is or how dazzling the technology will ever be under the hood, a great website will always require great text.</p>
</blockquote>
The Sexism of CSS2021-12-21T00:10:47Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-sexism-of-css/<p>Elaina Natario on <a href="https://thoughtbot.com/blog/tailwind-and-the-femininity-of-css">the perceived femininity of CSS</a> and the sexism that haunts our industry:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There are surely plenty of people of marginalized gender experience in all programming spaces, but they don’t have as much opportunity to surface new ideas. CSS is only allowed some slight breathing room simply because other programmers don’t even consider it to be part of web development. The distinction is even clearer when you consider the differences between front-end and backend salaries. CSS having any validity in the field while maintaining its feminine image is a threat to the notion that programming is a masculine exercise.</p>
<p>So when it comes down to the root of the problem, perhaps it isn’t CSS itself but our unwillingness to examine our sexist ideas of what is worthy in web development.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I had this feeling deep in my bones in one gig I worked on. CSS was seen as a “weak” language by everyone in the company—and therefore a language designed for women. Somehow I wasn’t seen as a real developer because of my interest in HTML and CSS above all else. It was pretty weird!</p>
<p>This is why I feel uncomfortable about the <a href="https://css-tricks.com/css-is-awesome/">“CSS is awesome” meme</a> because I also see the sexism in that statement, too. But it’s doubly annoying because <a href="https://twitter.com/TerribleMia/status/1472803139698900994">CSS <em>is</em> genuinely awesome</a> so the snark doesn’t really make much sense. Likewise, the whole “wow how do I center something in CSS? Heheheh this is not a real language unless it’s compiled” stuff, that’s the same kind of thing really. It’s the boring, sexist bullshit only in a different form.</p>
<p>I wonder if this happened in the old typesetting days, if there were different kinds of machines that were seen as more authentic, more “masculine” somehow. I’m sure there was some dude who bragged about how, simply because he used a linotype machine, that he was hot shit compared to some other poor chap because it was more complicated and required a tough dude wheel to pull the lever to do the thing.</p>
End of Year Thoughts 20212021-12-17T17:11:25Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/end-of-year-thoughts-2021/<p>I know I’m somewhat biased, but oh boy oh man howdy do I love this collection of <a href="https://css-tricks.com/category/2021-end-of-year-thoughts/">end of year thoughts</a> over on CSS-Tricks. I especially love this note from Geoff when he argues to carefully <a href="https://css-tricks.com/read-your-website/">read your website</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If there’s only one thing you can do to make your website better, then you could do a heckuva lot worse than taking some time to read it. Seriously, do more than look at the words—read them and take in everything that’s being said from the top to the very bottom. And really get in there. I’m talking about opening up everything in the navigation, expanding accordions, opening modals, and taking it all in.</p>
</blockquote>
Vectro Type2021-12-12T00:04:50Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/vectro-type/<p><a href="https://www.vectrotype.com/">Vectro Type</a> is a heckin’ neat website and type foundry from the folks that made Chartwell—a somewhat revolutionary font from back in the day that let you type in a series of numbers (<code>c+67+33</code> for example) and it’s OpenType magic would then convert that string into a bar, line, or pie chart. I remember seeing Chartwell for the first time in college and the enormous <em>gasp!</em> that exploded out of me.</p>
<p>Anyway, that’s Vectro. Now they have their own website and are officially a foundry you can buy weird fonts from. I particularly like <a href="https://www.vectrotype.com/whoa">WHOA</a> which has some seriously cool variable font stuff going on:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>WHOA is an experimental variable font, named after the sound commonly heard after dragging the slider for the first time. Use four sliders to expand the outlines into a three dimensional hyperspace. It also comes with a filled ‘top’ style, that can be layered on top to help with readability.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://www.vectrotype.com/vctr-mono">VCTR Mono</a> is exceptional as well. There’s a lot of monospace fonts out there but this one has a little bit of quirky wonkiness going on that I adore. But it’s not even remotely enough to be annoying or to impact readability. And I think that applies to Vectro’s body of work; they all have an offset-charm that’s similar to <a href="https://ohnotype.co/">OhNo Type</a> and their bananas work:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This monospaced type design is warm, slightly goofy, and tactile. Inspired by text found on the lenses and bodies of manual cameras, specifically Leicas and Nikons.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Okay one last compliment and then I’ll shut up: Vectro’s <a href="https://www.vectrotype.com/tester">Tester page</a> has all their fonts lined up so you can quickly take a glance and it’s just real nice.</p>
browser.engineering2021-12-05T05:50:23Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/browser-engineering/<p>I’ve only just started this excellent book called <a href="https://browser.engineering/">Web Browser Engineering</a> but it’s already so dang good that I have to stop reading it in order to quote this section:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The web is a grand, crazy experiment. It’s natural, nowadays, to watch videos, read news, and connect with friends on the web. That can make the web seem simple and obvious, finished, already built. But the web is neither simple nor obvious. It is the result of experiments and research reaching back to nearly the beginning of computing.</p>
<p>[...] The key thing to understand is this grand experiment is not over. The essence of the web will stay, but by studying web browsers you have the chance to contribute and to shape its future.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I am so thoroughly excited about this webbish book about the web. Now, where was I? Ah yes, back to reading.</p>
The Writers We Thought We Were2021-12-02T05:06:41Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-writers-we-think-we-are/<p>Everyone shut up, Saunders is talking:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In my early thirties I saw myself as a Hemingwayesque realist. My material: the time I'd spent working in the oil fields in Asia. I wrote story after story out of that material, and everything I wrote was minimal and strict and efficient and lifeless and humor-free, even though, in real life, I reflexively turned to humor at any difficult or important or awkward or beautiful moment.</p>
<p>I had chosen what to write, but I couldn’t seem to make it live.</p>
<p>One day, serving as a note taker on a conference call at the environmental engineering company where I was working, I started, out of boredom, writing these dark little Seussian poems. When I finished one, I'd draw a cartoon to go along with it. By the end of the call, I had around ten of these poem-and-cartoon pairs, and because they weren't my "real" writing, I almost threw them out as I left work that day. But something stopped me. I brought them home, dropped them on the table, went off to see the kids. And then I heard, from back at the table, the sound of genuine laughter, from my wife, as she read those stupid little poems.</p>
<p>This was, I realized with a start, the first time in years that anyone had reacted to my writing with pleasure.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is an extract from <em>A Swim in a Pond in the Rain</em>, Saunders’s book about writing that I won’t stop talking about, and it perfectly captures how I think about my own somewhat-idle-somewhat-stalled-somewhat-<em>something</em> writing career.</p>
<p>But hush! There’s more:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>To put it another way: having gone about as high up Hemingway Mountain as I could go, having realized that even at my best I could only ever hope to be an acolyte up there, resolving never again to commit the sin of being imitative, I stumbled back down into the valley and came upon a little shit-hill labeled “Saunders Mountain.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Of course this is upsetting because that shit-hill is a glorious, beautiful shit-hill that formed the ever so perfect novel <em>Lincoln in the Bardo</em>. But sure, okay. I’ll play along here, George. Yes. You indeed do suck.</p>
<p>I guess I’m not sure which mountain I climbed up before I realized I could go no further and had to turn back. Oscar Wilde Mountain? George Orwell Rock Formation? My writing from just a few years ago is <em>excruciatingly</em> dry, formal to a fault. It’s like a chap dressed up to the wrong party, wearing 13th century ballroom shoes to a skatepark. I was trying so damn hard to copy poor old Oscar and George back then—and it wasn’t until someone told me to stop writing manifestos that I bucked the trend.</p>
<p>Anyway, Saunders continues...</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This is a big moment for any artist (this moment of combined triumph and disappointment), when we have to decide whether to accept a work of art that we have to admit we weren’t in control of as we made it and of which we’re not entirely sure we approve. It is <em>less</em>, less than we wanted it to be, and yet it’s <em>more</em>, too—it’s small and a bit pathetic, judged against the work of the great masters, but there it is, all ours.</p>
<p>What we have to do at that point, I think, is go over sheepishly but boldly, and stand on our shit-hill, and hope it will grow.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is sort of how I see my writing contributions today; small, insignificantly tiny even, but mine.</p>
Type Specimen As Essay2021-11-28T02:33:45Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/type-specimen-as-essay/<p>One thing I love about <a href="https://ohnotype.co/fonts/retail">Retail</a> by OhNo Type Co. is that the type specimen is sort of like an essay. As you scroll through and see each of the designs for the bold, the thin, and the display styles, you also get a story about the design of the type family.</p>
<p>Also, I love the design of Retail and this lil snippet:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The designers here at Ohno enjoy taking a well-trodden genre, and amplifying what we love about it. Retail is the result of focussing our energy on the not-too-trendy world of humanist sans. What makes a humanist sans human-like? I think it comes down to seeing some evidence of the hand, some evidence of a pen, and little bit of warmth mixed in.</p>
</blockquote>
I Love Typography2021-11-25T02:49:08Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/i-love-typography/<p>For some daft reason I keep forgetting that you can buy fonts from <a href="https://fonts.ilovetypography.com/">I Love Typography</a> now. They have <a href="https://ilovetypography.com/2021/11/24/new-indie-foundries/">a growing catalogue</a> of foundries with buck wild designs and it’s worth coming back to see what just released.</p>
<p>Take <a href="https://fonts.ilovetypography.com/fonts/omega-type-foundry/platia?_ga=2.112748740.1969796624.1637808268-139424884.1637808268">Platia</a> by Omega Type Foundry for example. Lots of swirling, beautiful numerals and short, compact glyphs over there. Or <a href="https://fonts.ilovetypography.com/fonts/lucasfonts/koning-display">Koning Display</a> by Lucas Fonts with those endearing, chunky slabs of loveliness.</p>
Teranoptia2021-11-24T17:10:32Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/teranoptia/<p><a href="http://www.tunera.xyz/fonts/teranoptia/">What the absolute what</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Teranoptia is a typeface without letters, a peculiar contraption that allows you to imagine chimeric creatures just by typing letters with your keyboard. Its design has been inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry and by medieval illustrations, as well as by children's books. You can use it to create border ornaments, to daydream about monsters or just to spice your layouts with marginalia.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So cool.</p>
The Crane Wife2021-11-23T22:18:18Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-crane-wife/<p><a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/07/16/the-crane-wife/">CJ Hauser</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It turns out, if you want to save a species, you don’t spend your time staring at the bird you want to save. You look at the things it relies on to live instead. You ask if there is enough to eat and drink. You ask if there is a safe place to sleep. Is there enough here to survive?</p>
<p>Wading through the muck of the Aransas Reserve I understood that every chance for food matters. Every pool of drinkable water matters. Every wolfberry dangling from a twig, in Texas, in January, matters. The difference between sustaining life and not having enough was that small.</p>
<p>If there were a kind of rehab for people ashamed to have needs, maybe this was it. You will go to the gulf. You will count every wolfberry. You will measure the depth of each puddle.</p>
</blockquote>
Tilt2021-11-20T16:40:56Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/tilt/<p>This thing is remarkable. Designed by <a href="http://www.andyclymer.com/">Andy Clymer</a> back in 2019, <a href="https://math-practice.github.io/tilt-specimen/">Tilt</a> is a family of the three typefaces based on signage that Andy spotted around New York City. There’s Neon, Prism, and Warp—my favorite here is Prism:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Tilt Prism references the lettering that you might find vacuum-formed in plastic on a theater marquee, or cast in bronze at the entrance to a bank.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Incredible! But here’s something even better: on the website you can move your cursor across the screen and the letters will respond in kind. They’ll bend and contort and move around—that’s not some SVG magic though, but the power of the variable font format:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>With the advent of the variable font format, I like to think that a designer is freed from the traditional layout of a family of type. Tilt doesn’t give a designer variable control over the parameters you might expect — such as weight and width — but instead lets you dial in the “Horizontal Rotation” (HROT) and “Vertical Rotation” (VROT) of the tilting letterforms.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Even if this type family didn’t have all this fancy variable font stuff I would still be enamored by it. So I’m gonna bookmark the heck out of this and use it in my next project.</p>
Books, Money, and Accessibility2021-11-19T16:36:47Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/books-money-and-accessibility/<p>Lucy and I were texting about <a href="https://www.arionpress.com/store/114-the-fairy-tales-of-oscar-wilde">The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde</a> by the Arion Press the other day (it’s perhaps the most beautiful book I’ve seen in years). The shocker here is the price tag though: each book is $680! Wait, nope: that’s just for the paper. The standard edition is $800. And heck, their equally beautiful and weird edition of <a href="https://www.arionpress.com/store/115-frankenstein">Frankenstein</a>—look at those gosh darn illustrations—is $1000 a pop.</p>
<p>Questioning the price here feels somewhat wrong and makes me sweaty though. Just <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-5NhxYRqUI">look at Bourdain walk around in awe</a> as everyone simply does their job at the Arion Press. We could only hope to do half as good a job as them at anything else.</p>
<p>But that price...? It still makes me gasp a bit. Or, as I less eloquently said to Lucy:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If <em>I</em> wince at the price of a book, you done fucked up.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>After this text thread, Lucy <a href="https://lucybellwood.com/relative-pricing/">blogged up her side of the rant</a> where she thinks through how artists have to sacrifice the accessibility of their work when they make something so expensive:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I really believe that art is meant to be shared. I want to make things that people can afford. When I was just starting to learn about the world of fine presses and letterpress and Artists’ Books in college, I remember being deeply frustrated by the fact that these creators—many of whom were working with themes of tactility, interaction, and accessibility—were making work that got sold for hundreds of dollars to private institutions, who then kept it in small rooms known only to a small subset of people.</p>
<p>It all felt so prohibitive.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Agreed! This is the reason why I was attracted to the web in the first place, because of strangers in California, Tokyo, and Amsterdam. Their free work connected me to this vast network of writers and designers that eventually shifted the whole direction of my life. I wouldn’t be here without free blog posts, free essays, free thinking let loose on the world wide web. Would I have found that same work if it had been locked up in a book with a thousand dollar price tag? Absolutely not.</p>
<p>So questioning the price of these books is also questioning their accessibility. By making something so gosh darn beautiful means a slither of people will ever see these things. And that rubs me the wrong way. I believe in access to information <em>and</em> access to beautiful things for people without a tech salary and a big check book.</p>
<p>Yet! Yet! Isn’t publishing my work for free somewhat devalue the work itself? Take those essays I write once every 2-ish years. I can only make those for free because I have a day job and I can only make something essay-shaped because I take two weeks off in December to make them. Does this free work devalue the writing of others who are trying to make a living from it? But then again who would pay for something like those essays? (My hunch: almost no-one). And then it would severely limit their accessibility if it had a price tag. But if good writing (I am being too generous to myself here) can <em>only</em> be done part-time by everyone then...ugh. That’s not a good sign for writing as an art form.</p>
<p>Lucy took all my incoherent anxiety here and packaged it up much more neatly in her blog post, especially when she put it in the context of cartoonists:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What would it really take for cartoonists to be paid fairly for the work they do? What happens to the accessibility of my work if I’m paid what I’m worth? Would the cost be passed on to the consumer or shouldered by the publisher? Who could afford the resulting product?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Here’s another thing: most books on my shelves I’ve sadly forgotten. But the strongest memory I have of almost any book I’ve ever read is a stupidly expensive one published by the Arion Press: their edition of Moby Dick. It’s <a href="https://fontsinuse.com/uses/30/moby-dick-the-arion-press-edition">an absolute treasure</a>; a wonder, in paper form. But now you can’t buy a copy from their website and that feels so much more special to me. Not in the “look how cool I am for having a copy” but instead because it makes the book mythical, fated to disappear.</p>
<p>A once-in-a-lifetime thing.</p>
Who is web3 for?2021-11-14T17:22:03Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/web-history/<p>Since I had a terrifying dentist appointment the other day I needed something to listen to whilst I clenched my fists in absolute terror. And that’s when I realized that I hadn’t listened to Web History yet, originally written by Jay Hoffman <a href="https://css-tricks.com/chapter-1-birth/">over on CSS-Tricks</a> and now excellently <a href="https://adactio.com/journal/18602">narrated by Jeremy Keith</a>.</p>
<p>It’s real good and works perfectly as a podcast. Starting at the very beginning of the Internet (the pipes, the infrastructure, and the remarkable invention of packet switching), Web History dives into the beginning of the standards process and the browser wars, and then looks into the communities—like Neopets—that first appeared, and then grew, and then vanished (<a href="http://www.neopets.com/ntimes/">almost!</a>).</p>
<p>Sitting down in that chair whilst the dentist kicked my ass, I realized once again how marvelous the web is. It’s still a beautiful, impossible idea:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It was hard to explain, difficult to demo, and had overly lofty ambition. It was created by a man who didn’t have much interest in marketing his ideas. Even the name was somewhat absurd. “WWW” is one of only a handful of acronyms that actually takes longer to say than the full “World Wide Web.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is what’s shocking to me whenever someone tells me that the web is for “more than documents” as if, well, documents and writing and language zipping between us all isn’t somehow magic enough. So listening to Jeremy read Hoffman’s blinding enthusiasm and excitement for the web was genuinely inspiring. It made me wanna sit at my desk and tinker with new, weird ideas.</p>
<p>Afterwards, I began comparing all this hope and enthusiasm that I still have for the web with Robin’s <a href="https://society.robinsloan.com/archive/notes-on-web3/">notes on web3</a>. His piece is excellent and kind and although he disagrees fundamentally with web3 and all the awfulness of it, he still has the humility to explore why folks are so drawn to it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I think Web3 is propelled by exhaustion as much as by excitement. This isn’t apparent on the surface, but I believe it’s there, lurking just below. If you are 22 years old, Twitter has been around for about as long as you’ve known how to read. YouTube is fixed as firmly as the stars. I honestly don’t know how that feels, but I wonder if it’s claustrophobic?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is an important point Robin’s making in this post: the web is just not as exciting to most folks as it was several decades ago. In fact, if anything, it’s seen as a paved-over, pre-built thing now. The web is something that can no longer be improved or pushed forwards for most folks. And now we rarely see optimism about the web in the press or in popular culture (and for good reason!). But the problem is that today the web is only shown as a place to go and do bad things, not fall in love, or discover who you are, or build something lovely in. The web poisons those we love; it gets your grandad to join a cult, it makes our children depressed, etc.</p>
<p>Claustrophobic is certainly not how I feel about the web, but I imagine most people do. They feel trapped by it. The future feels like it’s already owned by Google or Facebook or some other enormous corporate interest, so I can understand that impulse to create something new like web3 because of that. Fuck the corpos, man! Let’s build our own thing!</p>
<p>But ugh. I can’t help but feel that all these crypto folks are looking in the wrong place. <a href="https://blog.cloudflare.com/what-is-web3/">Merging the blockchain and the web</a> is not how we make the web better, less scary, more safe, more free. The blockchain is not punk rock.</p>
<p>On this note: Ethan wrote about <a href="https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/seven-into-seven/">the problems with AMP</a> and how it was very un-web like back when Google forced publishers to use it and single-handledly <a href="https://wptavern.com/amp-has-irreparably-damaged-publishers-trust-in-google-led-initiatives">messed with an entire industry</a>. But instead of digging into the specifics of the AMP “standards”, Ethan quotes Ursula Franlin where she reminds us to think about which people a specific technology helps and which it hurts:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The questions to ask are “Whose benefits? Whose risks?” rather than “What benefits? What risks?”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Who is the web for? Everyone, everywhere, and not only the few with a financial stake in it. It’s still this enormously beautiful thing that has so much potential.</p>
<p>But web3? That’s just not it, man.</p>
Design Systems Metrics2021-11-03T02:21:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/design-systems-metrics/<p>This is dumb, but hear me out: what if there was an equivalent of Google’s Web Vitals but for design systems? What if you could look at a report that showed precisely how bad your design system was and what you needed to fix right away?</p>
<p>What signals would we need to see a design system clearly? My hunch right now is: productivity, consistency, and accessibility. If one or all of those signals are off then you could use this report to make the case to hire a dedicated front-end engineer or designer for the team. Or maybe it could help you focus on a specific area of the design system that you didn’t realize was a problem before (like, say, the accessibility of your form components). Perhaps once you start monitoring these signals in your codebase and your component library it could tell you when something is going well even! I’m great! Give me a raise!</p>
<p>So my thinking here is that productivity tells you if people are fast or slow using the system, consistency shows you if they’re sticking to the system or going off the rails and making their own stuff, and accessibility shows the impact of that system on customers.</p>
<p>Or to put this another way:</p>
<ul>
<li>Is it fast?</li>
<li>Is it getting better?</li>
<li>Is it helping?</li>
</ul>
<p>Here’s a sketch of what this could look like:</p>
<div class="metrics">
<div class="metric-card good">
<h3>Productivity</h3>
<span class="score">70</span>
<p>Most developers saved time by using the library.</p>
</div>
<div class="metric-card bad">
<h3>Consistency</h3>
<span class="score">32</span>
<p>Most pull requests used custom components.</p>
</div>
<div class="metric-card good">
<h3>Accessibility</h3>
<span class="score">65</span>
<p>Some components aren’t WCAG 2.1 compliant.</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>(Side note: I am somewhat hesitant about the productivity stuff because I don’t believe that <em>time</em> is the most important thing when it comes to a design system and as soon as you start measuring how people work it will inevitably become this extremely evil thing. So perhaps that needs to change.)</p>
<p>But either way, I haven’t heard folks talk about this much. What measurements besides these would you use? How do you see a design system clearly?</p>
What Does a Good Design System Feel Like?2021-11-02T17:24:21Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/what-does-a-good-design-system-feel-like/<p>When folks talk about design systems they often mention developer productivity (ew), or consistency (better), or accessibility (best).</p>
<p>However, one thing folks don’t talk about often is what a good design system <em>feels</em> like. A good design system, to me at least, isn’t about me being able to make a website faster or a little bit more consistent—although yeah I do like those things. The reason I care about making a good design system is because of that rare yet incredible moment once you’ve cleaned things up; the whole system begins to make sense in your mind. You can click-clack things together effortlessly, you can reach for the right tool without thinking about it, and you feel like every contribution you make is to the system, rather to this one-off thing.</p>
<p>(This is what I realize now is the difference between senior and junior folks: senior folks care way more about the system of things, rather than the success of this one feature or product. Every contribution they make is to the system so that everyone feels the benefits.)</p>
<p>But that feeling of a good design system! It’s like reading a book that’s so very clear and concise, without a word in the wrong place. It’s like opening a cupboard and the world inside is structured, has a hierarchy, is easy to get to without a second thought. In a good design system you spend almost 100% of your time on the problem itself rather than trying to understand the eighteen different ways of solving it, like...</p>
<p>“Ah, so team X does <em>this</em> and team B has done <em>that</em> but team X is adamant that we do things this very specific way because they just built this <em>other</em> thing last week.”</p>
<p>This is the feeling of a bad design system; no one has the answer, everyone has opinions, the rules are counter-intuitive and poorly documented, and the world is spinning out from under you to reveal only an enormous soupy mess of confusion.</p>
<p>With all this in mind, I wonder how many folks hate front-end development and CSS because they see the clutter and the clusterfuck of disorganized arguments in the codebase. They see there’s umpteen ways to add a label and they’re annoyed that there’s this one loud person that keeps looking over their shoulder saying that they’re not doing things consistently.</p>
<p>So perhaps when folks complain about the front-end what they’re really complaining about is the feeling of a bad design system.</p>
A Web Browser Built for Me2021-11-01T15:04:44Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/a-web-browser-built-for-me/<p>Right now I feel like there’s no browser built just for me. All the options today are bloated, big, clunky; I reckon they’re all trying to do too much. Booting up Chrome today feels like moving a starship into orbit and being blasted by ads on reentry. Safari feels like both hands are tied behind my back. Edge is a weirdly capitalist (?) browser where I keep getting pinged about promotions and ways to save money by spending money. Firefox is fine (but it’s by far the saddest web browser, destined at any moment to leave you and disappear without a word).</p>
<p>What I want instead is an anarchist web browser.</p>
<p>What I’d really like to see is a browser that cuts things out, that takes things away from the web. Colors, fonts, confusion. Do you need an enormous JavaScript engine under the hood to power a modern web browser? I don’t think you do. Do you need all the extensions? All the latest CSS features? Nah, mate.</p>
<p>Throw away everything and start again and focus intensely about what people care about when it comes to the web. I think of the Kindle and what enormous potential that browser had to change our relationship with the internet, to push it towards a web that you read (instead of one that tries so very hard to read you).</p>
<p>I think a lot about how Nintendo doesn’t play the same game as Sony and Microsoft when it comes to their consoles. Do they need a super powered machine that ray traces the living heck out o everything? I don’t really think that anyone cares about whether the next Mario game has ray tracing or not. They only care that it’s really, really good. And technology alone does not a good game make.</p>
<p>I guess what I want here is the Addams Family of web browsers. The estranged child of web browsing. A web browser built for me.</p>
This House of Lovely Secrets2021-11-01T14:48:10Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-house-of-lovely-secrets/<p>C bought a typewriter and hid it in her car. Each week she’d drive out to her parents’ house without telling me and, under this veil of secrecy, she’d type out messages on little cards. On each of them she’d write a joke, a memory, a secret about a secret that we’d told each other over the past year.</p>
<p>On my birthday I entered the kitchen and found myself surrounded by balloons and cakes and hugs. C then handed me a book—it was a collection of all those cards bound together. A book of secrets.</p>
<p>Later—after a brief, hour-long period where I absolutely did not cry and you cannot prove that I ever did—I asked where she hid everything. Where were the balloons and the cake? I was at home working the whole time. Where did you make this book?</p>
<p>In the most C way imaginable, she just said 👀 👀 👀.</p>
<p>So now, ever since my birthday, as I walk through the hallways of this house, I think about all the other gifts hidden in every corner of our home; in the closets and cabinets, above us in the ceiling, and in the floorboards beneath. We’re surrounded by gifts.</p>
<p>I can’t stop smiling because I know what my job is: add more to the collection. Build a bigger house of lovely secrets and hidden gifts.</p>
Unlimited Sand and Money Still Won’t Save the Hamptons2021-10-30T16:52:52Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/unlimited-sand-and-money-still-won%E2%80%99t-save-the-hamptons/<p>Here’s a great piece—wonderfully written and expertly illustrated with maps—about <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-hamptons-real-estate-beach-climate-proofing">how climate change is going to effect houses and beaches in the Hamptons</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Are we going to take this opportunity to reenvision the way we live with water, or are we just going to fight against it until we lose?” asks Alison Branco, coastal director for the Nature Conservancy in New York. “You can continue to pour sand and build beaches if your money is infinite and your sand is infinite. Of course, neither of those is true.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As I was reading this piece I couldn’t stop thinking about a possible/maybe future where mansions are scattered along the coastline now empty (the rich having abandoned them in search of more temperate playgrounds). I can imagine poor folks moving into those empty neighborhoods, walking through beautiful, empty-shelved libraries and empty Olympic-sized infinity pools, overlooking barren, rocky shores without sand.</p>
<p>Happy weekend, everyone!</p>
Occupant Oldstyle2021-10-28T15:41:42Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/occupant-oldstyle/<p>I love the look of this: <a href="https://occupantfonts.com/fonts/occupant-oldstyle/">Occupant Oldstyle</a> by Cyrus Highsmith and and June Shin. It’s a perfect addition to the Occupant Fonts library; Oldstyle is playful and silly—look at that Q!—and yet seriously constructed—look at the numbers!</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The rounded triangular endings are the result of a long fermentation process that combines ingredients from Japanese Mincho style typefaces, rounded sans serifs, electronic music, and toys. Highsmith calls them ‘child-safe serifs’.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If you have a sec, make sure to go through their back catalogue of work, like <a href="https://occupantfonts.com/fonts/ibis-display/">Ibis Display</a> or <a href="https://occupantfonts.com/fonts/zocalo-text/">Zócalo Text</a>. It’s all wondrous.</p>
Spacing and Sci-Fi2021-10-21T02:58:48Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/spacing-and-sci-fi/<p>Rutherford Craze on <a href="https://www.mass-driver.com/article/md-nichrome-on-spacing-and-sci-fi">the design of MD Nichrome</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>…something I think about a lot in my work is the idea of the technology gap. When a creative work moves from one medium to another, not every part of it survives the transition: the digital version of a typeface originally cut in metal is an imperfect replica, just as a film is never the same as the book it was based on — and for much the same reason: the work must be re-made to fit a fundamentally different medium.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dang, I love the idea of adding serifs to MD Nichrome. This is such a great piece.</p>
Weird Browsers2021-10-19T16:14:01Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/weird-browsers/<p>For the CSS-Tricks newsletter, I wrote a bit about <a href="https://css-tricks.com/newsletter/273-weird-browsers/">all the weird browsers</a> I’ve been seeing lately:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...it feels like there’s something in the air when it comes to browsers. Folks are starting to think about them differently and that’s exciting. And although in the front-end world we’re constantly bemoaning the convergence of browsers towards Chrome and WebKit—and for good reason, too (ideally we’d have both browser engine and UI diversity). But I think that this can sometimes be a little short-sighted because UI diversity is just as important, perhaps.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m <em>excited</em> about all this.</p>
White Tears and the OP-12021-10-14T00:53:09Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/white-tears-and-the-op-1/<p><em>White Tears</em> kicked my ass and it’s impossible to describe why. I read it in three or four big gulps this week but it’s so good that I’m still in a deep fit of despair about just how good it all was. It’s a novel by Hari Kunzru about music and ghosts and the cost of addiction but about halfway through it becomes this swirling vortex of memories and conversations and then just pure, utter delirium.</p>
<p>One of the songs mentioned in that novel is Tommy Johnson and Ishman Bracey’s <a href="https://youtu.be/RHw1ugBLS5g"><em>Canned Heat Blues</em></a>, a beautiful song written in 1928. I’ve been listening to it all week. And so—just like the characters in <em>White Tears</em>—I find myself falling down this rabbit hole of music I’ve never listened to before: Charles Brown, Henry Thomas, Blind Boy Fuller, Sylvester Weaver, Skip James.</p>
<hr />
<p>After a full decade of looking at the OP-1 I finally did it, I bought the damn thing. It arrived, I opened it and up and turned it on, boom; a tiny device with strange nobs and a completely bananas UI now sat on my kitchen table. After twenty minutes of fiddling with it I realized it’s sort of like using an old computer without windows or tabs or any navigation at all. Instead, you have to rely on your memory about what button or key was just pressed, what packet of information you stored where and how.</p>
<p>The OP-1 is magic though because it’s more than just a synthesizer and drum machine, it’s also a sampler. You can record your voice and then split each part of the recording and bind each note to a key. You can record on multiple tracks and filter them, distort them, and in the first evening I bent and welded my own voice into something half resembling a Massive Attack drum beat. Next, my voice became a shrill oomph of despair or a high pitched squeak.</p>
<p>The OP-1 does what any good computer really should; it makes you feel like you can reconstruct the universe in your own image—reinvent everything from scratch.</p>
<hr />
<p><a href="https://www.lalal.ai/">LALAL.AI</a> is likewise magic. You throw an audio file at it and it’ll pull the vocals apart from the instruments and isolate them. Or you can pluck a bass line and drum beat out from underneath a guitar solo. It doesn’t always work perfectly but when it does <a href="http://lalal.ai/">LALAL.AI</a> feels like what websites were meant to do. The platonic ideal of a website; remixing.</p>
<p>Last night, I realized I could take <em>Canned Heat Blues</em> and split out Tommy Johnson’s vocals from the song, download it as an mp3, and then sample it back into the OP-1. My goal wasn’t really to create a new song out of it but something else altogether, something more important than just making another EDM song.</p>
<hr />
<p>Several hours later I found myself sat at my office listening to a loop of Johnson’s ghostly voice from almost a hundred years ago and I realized that within this sample there are a hundred thousand other songs to find inside it. Each recording in that way is a gift of samples and possibilities, with songs hidden inside other songs—just like how <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/6oEFRBgGkATGn8ZpQ0TTdl?si=82fe187495374d09">Home</a> by Caribou transforms Gloria Barnes’s original slow and wistful <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/5VN2dZer45WzuaorRa242v?si=23f77a06cf7c40b5">Home</a> into an altogether different thing; upbeat, happy, dancing.</p>
<p>I love that so very much; the idea that there are infinite songs within songs. I imagine Tommy Johnson sat in a studio in Memphis, singing his heart out into a microphone in 1928 and now someone else, two centuries from now; sampling, remixing, and playing along with him.</p>
The Manual of Diacritics2021-10-11T23:35:01Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/manual-of-diacritics/<p>Here’s a beautiful book called the <a href="http://manualofdiacritics.eu/"><em>Manual of Diacritics</em></a> by Radek Sidun. Diacritics are those peculiar shapes above and below characters that are mostly absent in English—<code>façade</code> and <code>naïve</code> are those rare leftovers—but these marks are extremely important for many languages where the words will fail to make sense without them. And so Radek’s manual here proves that these marks have a utility, and we should care for them just as we should any other type of punctuation, but these diacritics are stunning, too. And we should gawp at them all night long.</p>
<p>I’m excited to pick up a copy of this thing.</p>
Punctuation in novels2021-10-11T01:13:29Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/punctuation-in-novels/<p><a href="https://medium.com/@neuroecology/punctuation-in-novels-8f316d542ec4">Adam J Calhoun:</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Inspired by a series of posters, I wondered what did my favorite books look like without words. Can you tell them apart or are they all a-mush? In fact, they can be quite distinct. Take my all-time favorite book, Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. It is dense prose stuffed with parentheticals. When placed next to a novel with more simplified prose — Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy — it is a stark difference (see above).</p>
<p>Yes, the contrast is stark. But the wild mix of symbols can be beautiful, too. Look at the array of dots and dashes above! This morse code is both meaningless and yet so meaningful. We can look and say: brief sentence; description; shorter description; action; action; action.</p>
</blockquote>
Things Learned Blogging2021-10-07T15:28:18Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/things-learned-blogging/<p>Jim Nielsen on <a href="https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2021/things-learned-blogging/">removing the hurdles to blogging</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If the goal of your blog is to blog, i.e. to write and publish, then start by removing everything that gets in the way of that goal.</p>
<p>Eschew anything beyond writing the content of a post. No art direction. No social media imagery. No comments. No webmentions. No analytics. If you really want to be ruthless, no embedded rich media (images, video, etc.) only links to rich media.</p>
<p>Imagine stripping away everything in the way of writing until the only thing staring you back in the face is a blinking cursor and an empty text file. That’ll force you to think about writing.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Here Jim is riffing on a post called <a href="https://macwright.com/2019/02/06/how-to-blog.html">How to blog</a> by Tom MacWright :</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If you’re trying to blog, write. Work in the ‘posts’ and ‘drafts’ folders. Create TODO lists and schedules to get posts live. Stay out of the blog configuration, templates, plugins, and whatnot.</p>
<p>Now, sure, it’s fun to tinker from time to time. This blog, <a href="http://macwright.org/">macwright.org</a>, changes over time, at the pace of about 100 lines of code a year, mostly deletions. But this change is limited and intentionally sporadic, never happening more than a few times a year.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I love that idea, slowing down the pace of change by lines of code per year. And 100 lines of is glacial, almost no change at all. But it prevents the enormous and time consuming re-writes that get in the way of blogging.</p>
Why Is Every Young Person in America Watching ‘The Sopranos’?2021-10-07T15:26:54Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/why-is-every-young-person-in-america-watching-%E2%80%98the-sopranos%E2%80%99/<p>Willy Staley wrote a piece about <em>The Sopranos</em> and captured <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/29/magazine/sopranos.html">why it’s so gosh darn good</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Biederman argued that the show is, at its heart, about the bathetic nature of decline. “Decline not as a romantic, singular, aesthetically breathtaking act of destruction,” he said, but as a humiliating, slow-motion slide down a hill into a puddle of filth. “You don’t flee a burning Rome with your beautiful beloved in your arms, barely escaping a murderous horde of barbarians; you sit down for 18 hours a day, enjoy fewer things than you used to, and take on the worst qualities of your parents while you watch your kids take on the worst qualities of you.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sweet Christ. On a lighter note, I also watched <em>The Many Saints of Newark</em> this week—it’s a prequel film to <em>The Sopranos</em>—and it has flashes of tension and familiar brilliance in it but by the end it ultimately goes nowhere. So by the time the credits rolled, it felt just like any old gangster flick.</p>
<p>But also sweet christ.</p>
Experimental Variable Fonts2021-10-02T19:47:48Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/experimental-variable-fonts/<p>In his excellent newsletter, Font of the Month Club (which I cannot recommend more highly), DJR wrote about variable fonts and how they’ve been out for a while yet <a href="https://mailchi.mp/252c1a3e328e/your-october-font-of-the-month-190523?e=62d470e7e3">they still feel like an experimental technology</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In my perception, they’re in a bit of an awkward phase right now. Support in browsers is great, and designers are using techniques such as animation to push the limits of the technology — after five years we can hardly think of them as a shiny new toy. But at the same time I don’t think they’ve fully left the “experimental” realm and entered the day-to-day workflow of the average designer.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I had never put this thought to words before but I’ve felt this way for some time, too. Variable fonts are struggling to gain traction for a number of reasons (education and price are maybe the biggest barriers to entry though).</p>
<p>Anyway, to help fix this problem, DJR made his excellent Output Sans available for free with the newsletter. So go subscribe to this thing and then download Output Sans.</p>
From the distance of this website2021-10-01T14:55:34Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/from-the-distance-of-this-website/<p>I can be whoever I want and no-one can tell me otherwise. I can be funny or dark, a romantic or a raging goth. I can be a typographer, a web designer, a poet. Tomorrow? My accent can change, the colors revert, typefaces flipped inside out; I can change everything about this website and reimagine who I am. Edit the bad or worrisome or downright embarrassing stuff out, throw away the unsavory stuff, until I’m only showing you me at my very best.</p>
<p>So what you see here isn’t me.</p>
<p>Without the safety of this website my flaws and vices are clear: I’m often lazy and uncoordinated. I don’t have a lot of natural social grace (or rather it takes a long time for me to warm up to charming). My ego gets in the way all the time, and I’m so very jealous of everyone around me. Also: I’m perpetually, completely, infinitely terrified of everything.</p>
<p>So websites are weird like that. They’re a fun house of mirrors that can be manipulated in every which way to hide who the author really is. And I don’t mean that in a cynical way, I mean to say this with a dash of optimism: with this website I can redesign myself as much as I do the homepage (I hope you like the new one).</p>
<p>With this website I can figure out who I want to be.</p>
Climate Change Is the New Dot-Com Bubble2021-09-29T01:03:38Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/climate-change-is-the-new-dot-com-bubble/<p>Paul Ford describes <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/climate-change-economy-dot-com-bubble/">his climate mid-life crisis</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I began to feel a strong sense of déjà vu. I couldn't place it until, one night, in the glow of the e-reader, I realized: It's Web 1.0 all over again. We are in the Pets.com-puppet-mascot era of climate. The comedy of the technology industry is playing again as a kind of Ibsenian tragedy: Scientists and academics told everyone about this thing for decades, and almost everyone ignored them. But then enough people got interested, and now there's a market. And as a result there are a million business models, a million solutions, huge promises of the change to come: We'll pour everything we have into green-energy infrastructure. We'll transact in carbon marketplaces. We'll pull a trillion tons of CO2 out of the air every year. Never mind that today we can do about 0.0005 percent of that, which rounds to nothing.</p>
<p>[...] I assume that the money will come. There are too many hot days for it not to. And obviously I want things to go differently this time. But I don't know how you bootstrap a globe-spanning bureaucracy yesterday. I can't even tell you what infrastructure we need, just that in general infrastructure evolves, slowly, in response to tragedy.</p>
</blockquote>
Packing My Library 2021-09-28T15:57:24Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/packing-my-library/<p>I was reading Alberto Manguel’s <em>Packing My Library</em> on the train back to SF the other day and the moment I read this passage I hurriedly underlined it over and over again:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There exists, perhaps, in all human imagination, an unspoken expectation of losing what has been achieved. You build, of course, because you want a family, a house, a business. If you can, you create something out of sounds and colors and words. You compose a song, you paint a picture, you write a book. But underlying all you do is the secret knowledge that everything will one day be swept away: the song will no longer be sung, the picture will fade, the book will go up in flames until the day yet to come (as Isaiah says) when we shall be given beauty for ashes.</p>
<p>But to lose one must first find. If loss (or its possibility) is inherent in every intent, in every hope, then that intent, that hope, that desire to build something that comes to life from the ashes is correspondingly a part of everything we lose. Even though history has taught us that nothing lasts for long, the impulse to create in the face of impending destruction, to resettle in foreign lands and reproduce ancestral models, to build new libraries is a powerful and unquenchable impulse.</p>
</blockquote>
Keeping Track2021-09-25T04:16:37Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/keeping-track/<p>Lucy made <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/setting-sail-for-56514754">a huge spreadsheet</a> to help her see the status of her project and hot dang it looks scary to me:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This was actually hugely helpful, because I've been watching my overachiever tendencies flare up during meetings with Susan, whispering "Surely you can get this done in a year and a half. That's so much time! Don't be unreasonable and ask for more." But I also have a strong sense of self-preservation standing on my other shoulder hollering "YOU DESERVE A PUBLISHING SCHEDULE THAT DOESN'T REDUCE YOUR BONES TO DUST, BITCH."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Likewise, Dave Rupert <a href="https://daverupert.com/2021/09/my-notion-blogging-kanban/">made a spreadsheet to help him blog</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Another problem I had with all my folder full o’ posts strategy was that I didn’t know whether a post was nearly done or a scrap of an idea. I was lost. Every two months or so I’d have to click through each file to repopulate my memory buffer with the statuses of each post. A lack of a system made it more difficult and time-consuming maintain.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Right now I have two big pieces I’m working on; one on my relationship with Tik Tok (that’s the most embarrassing sentence anyone has ever typed) and another post on pain and prestige and work. But they’ve stalled, lost in the enormous stack of Markdown files I type out in a blur via iA Writer.</p>
<p>For years I’ve only had a disorganized mess of files in that folder, and it works, but…reading these posts above makes me think I need something more organized. Maybe it’s not working for me any more.</p>
<p>I know I’ve been writing less lately, too. I’m all out of the writing juice. And yet, and yet… perhaps a list of all the posts on the go—and the current status of each post—would give me that push to, ya know, get the darned things done.</p>
<p>Maybe I need an upgrade.</p>
Epicene design information2021-09-24T17:35:18Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/epicene-design-information/<p>Bookmarking this post from Kris Sowersby all about his new type family, <a href="https://klim.co.nz/blog/epicene-design-information/">Epicene</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Epicene Text & Display are Baroque typefaces inspired by the work of two 18th century maestros: J-F. Rosart and J.M. Fleischmann. Typographically, Epicene’s exaggerated details add rigour at small sizes and vigour at large sizes. Culturally, Epicene says one thing: typefaces have no gender.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Writing about type and <em>especially</em> type history is tough, but here Kris makes it look easy.</p>
Money Stuff2021-09-22T16:03:30Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/money-stuff/<p>I know talking about Matt Levine’s newsletter is like talking about how much you love Tame Impala (did you know that he plays all his own instruments???), but dangit—Matt’s writing consistently great.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-09-20/investment-banking-is-cheap-if-you-re-rich">Like this piece</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Investment banking is a business of building long-term relationships. Your job, as an investment banker, is to become close to the people who possess giant piles of money, in the hopes that one day they will do giant deals with their giant piles of money and give you some of it. If you are at the weekly meeting of an investment-banking group and everyone is going around the room talking about what they did last week, and someone says “I did a billion-dollar merger and earned an $8 million fee for the bank,” and you say “I played Settlers of Catan with Mark Zuckerberg,” you win, because the expected value of proximity to a giant pile of money is so much higher than the value of an actual fee from a normal-sized pile of money.</p>
</blockquote>
MÖRK BORG2021-09-16T22:10:58Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/mork-borg/<p>It’s not often that a website makes me gasp but <a href="https://morkborg.com/">MÖRK BORG</a> did the trick. It’s a D’n’D-esque game which I don’t know much about but the overall weirdness of this game and the website itself is just...beautiful.</p>
<p>Take the footnotes, for example:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Remember: Make it dark, depressing, weird and cruel. But let everyone partake in the suffering. Be sure to avoid sexist, racist, homophobic and transphobic tropes and themes in your content. There's plenty of that crap in the real world already. The world of MÖRK BORG doesn't need it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I have no idea what’s going on here. But there’s tons of typefaces to look at! I think one of them is Fakir?</p>
Blunder2021-09-13T00:53:08Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/blunder/<p>These are the days that I want; half in a book, half in a text file, halfway through two videogames in two separate rooms. I am plodding through ideas, running from room to room, from one thing to another.</p>
<p>These most perfect of days always begin with a long walk in the morning for coffee—either up and over the hill onto the Bernal strip or down the hill into Glenn Park—and so the day begins with rigid structure; shower, shave, dress. But eventually the day crumbles into a beautiful, disorganized blunder with no plans or goals. It’s at this time of the day I begin roaming about the apartment with a website half finished, a blog post in progress, a homepage redesigned. Bliss.</p>
<p>Like today; I shipped a new design for the homepage and updated the colors of the site, played an embarrassing amount of <em>Ghost of Tsushima</em> and <em>Psychonauts 2</em>—stopping only to pace around the apartment thinking of new ideas for writing projects—and now I’m putting the finishing touches to the CSS-Tricks newsletter.</p>
<p>I wish the structure of my days could be more like this though; more haphazard, more jumping from thing to thing with reckless abandon. There’s a punch-in-the-gut feeling I get when my days have too much structure to them. I require that feeling of jumping around whenever I want to, and I think it’s what gives me the energy to be a functional person. That jumpiness feeds back into my work and makes everything so much lighter and energetic, too.</p>
<p>How do I push my working life further in this direction then? How do I make my life...messier?</p>
Our Fury Over Abortion Was Dismissed for Decades As Hysterical2021-09-03T16:30:56Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/our-fury-over-abortion-was-dismissed-for-decades-as-hysterical/<p>“In vast portions of this country,” <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2019/05/how-extreme-abortion-bans-in-alabama-and-georgia-happened.html">wrote Rebecca Traister back in 2019</a>, “<em>Roe</em> might as well not exist already”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[For] years, I’ve listened to Democratic politicians distance themselves from abortion by calling it tragic and insisting it should be rare, instead of simply acknowledging it to be a crucial, legal cornerstone of comprehensive health care for women, people with uteruses, and their families. I have seethed as generations of Democrats have argued that if we could just get past abortion and focus instead on economic issues, we’d be better off. They never seem to get that abortion is an economic issue, and that what they think of as economic issues — from wages and health care to housing and education policy — are at the very heart of the reproductive justice movement, which understands access to abortion to be one (pivotal!) part of a far broader set of circumstances that determine if, when, under what circumstances, and with what resources human beings might have and raise children.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>God, I just want to quote all of this thing. Rebecca continues:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>First, never again let anyone tell you that the fury or determination to fight on this account is invalid, inappropriate, or inconvenient to a broader message. Consider that this is also what women and marginalized people are told all the time about their anger in general: that they should not express it, not let it out, because to give voice to their rage will distract from their aims, undermine them; that it will ultimately be bad for them. This messaging is strategic. It is designed to get angry people to keep their mouths shut. Because if they are successfully stifled, they will remain at the margins, isolated, alone in their fury. It is only if they start letting it out and acting on it and working in tandem with others who share their outrage that they might begin to form networks, coalitions, the building blocks of movements; it is when the anger is let loose that the organizing happens in earnest.</p>
</blockquote>
Moiré no more2021-09-02T07:26:24Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/moir%C3%A9-no-more/<p>Just as I finished moaning about not finding any good reading out there, I spotted this post by Marcin on <a href="https://www.getrevue.co/profile/shift-happens/issues/moire-no-more-688319">how he fixed old photographs for his book</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Somehow, through hard work of people much smarter than me, I could go deep into the photo and not only inspect its frequencies, but actually change them. Imagine being able to edit the nutrition label and see the food transform in front of you. Imagine drawing on top of a weather forecast and summon rain this way. I was so excited I couldn’t sleep.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I met up with Marcin the other day. We talked about his upcoming book all about typewriters, <em>Shift Happens</em>, and the absolutely bonkers amount of time he’s spent writing, editing, designing, and researching this thing. We talked about how he typeset the smallest of details and so—if that preview was anything to go by—this book is going to be something extraordinary; a truly beautiful thing.</p>
<p>Go <a href="https://www.getrevue.co/profile/shift-happens/">subscribe to his newsletter</a> because everything he writes is like this.</p>
Ugh2021-09-02T03:01:33Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/ugh/<p>Lately I’m feeling rather <em>ugh</em>. I know why; reading has lost its luster. I find myself uninterested in almost every book, every essay, every tweet. One morning I’ll get all excited and pick up a book that someone recommends and then—bah!—the text is joyless. It doesn’t have that peculiar <em>kick</em> of newness to it and at that very moment my RSS wellspring runs dry, too.</p>
<p>Without a dazzling book the world suddenly feels quiet, empty. Lonely, even. And ugh I feel like I need high quality hypertext to simply be a functional person.</p>
<p>I <em>require</em> that text do this unspoken playful, hopscotch thing and when I can’t find anything quite like what I’m looking for then I get all mopey. I mope to the coffee shop, I mope to the corner store, I mope around Target as we get small things for our apartment. Friends lose their razzle dazzle, too. What good am I to my friends without a !!!!-have-you-seen-this-book-yet kind of text message? No good to anyone.</p>
<p>I picked up <em>The Revenge of Geography</em> yonks ago from a tiny library in Noe, which might I add—wow!—what a name for a book. I had missed the blurb at the bottom from Henry Kissinger though and just before I openes the book I saw his repulsive quote. What view of geography does this book have if Kissinger’s the main guy, the blurbist of honor? With absolutely no due respect whatsoever: fuck Henry Kissinger and everyone remotely close to him.</p>
<p>Ahem.</p>
<p>Next I picked up a book about Atari and the death of the video game industry but I felt like the guy was too rambly, too impressed by himself for me to enjoy any of it. (This reminds me that there’s a kind of charm when the writer is enjoying their own company, but it’s a very difficult thing to pull off without sounding like you’re smoking your own supply.)</p>
<p>After that I picked up <em>The Smallest Lights in the Universe</em> by Sara Seager and I hoped it would snap me out of this boring malaise. I hoped it would be a memoir of sorts, like <em>H is for Hawk</em> but switching out the hawk for Jupiter. But after half a dozen pages I find, again, this sort of self-impressed style of writing. It becomes cludgy and soup-thick, stew-like, even. I can’t describe it but when people talk about romantic relationships and subsequently describe themselves as a catch without a hint of irony then ughhhhh I am bored of you.</p>
<p>All these <em>ugh</em> feelings likely have nothing to do with the books and everything to do with me. I’m not looking for a book when I pick these things up, I’m looking for An Event. I want to feel like I have to keep up with them as they drag me into the future. I want an entirely different vantage point from a tip of the world I’ve never seen before.</p>
<p>I suppose then that I’m not looking for good books, I’m perhaps looking for new friends.</p>
<p>Or something, I don’t know man. I just work here.</p>
Bay Curious 2021-08-30T01:23:40Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/bay-curious/<p>I love <a href="https://www.kqed.org/podcasts/baycurious">Bay Curious</a>. I’ve been listening to it for the last few weeks as I make my way down the Secret Coffee Corridor and then trek up and over Holly Park for coffee each morning. And sure, I’ve never really listened to a podcast about the city I live in or been a fan of local radio before, but Bay Curious ticks all the boxes for a Very Good Thing; it’s got that early-morning-electricity, that heck-yeah-let’s-go-rambunctiousness. It’s just the sort of deliriously enthusiastic stuff that I need right now.</p>
<p>If you live in the Bay Area and feel like you want to be closer to this beautiful, broken, weirdo town, then I’d highly recommend giving it a whirl.</p>
The Power of a Link2021-08-29T01:36:33Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-power-of-a-link/<p><a href="https://www.bryanbraun.com/2020/10/03/the-power-of-a-link/">Bryan Braun</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A link, on the open internet, is a vote. It’s your way of saying, “this is great, and more people should know about it.” We talk about how much power the search engines have, but if you think about it, the search engines listen to us. They see what we link to, what we click, and how long we stay. At the end of the day, we are the curators of what gets surfaced on the internet.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Analytics are bad and I try my best not to care about retweets or hearts or faves or follower counts. But damn, if a hyperlink to my work isn’t just the greatest compliment someone can give. And although I loved Byran’s post I think that it’s useful to note that—yes—links are power, but even more excitingly, <a href="https://alwaysreadthemanual.com/read/issues/3/jeremy-keith/article.html">links are a kindness</a>, too:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The web is just twenty years old, and I’m not sure that we have yet come to terms with the power that this new medium grants us. When we create websites, it’s all too easy for us to fall into old patterns of behavior and treat our creations as independent self-contained islands lacking in outbound links. But that’s not the way the web works. The sites we build should not be cul-de-sacs for the inquisitive visitors who have found their way to our work by whatever unique trails they have followed.</p>
</blockquote>
Our Impatience Is Worth Billions2021-08-28T02:07:17Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/our-impatience-is-worth-billions/<p><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/clash-of-clans-proves-that-our-impatience-is-worth-billions">Casey Johnston:</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Waiting in line, waiting for someone at a coffee shop, sitting on a bus—at these moments, people tend not to feel particularly in control. Phones appear automatically in your hand at such moments, and mobile games with deceptively intricate nested tasks that cascade into waves of accomplishment transport you seamlessly to the other side of the moment you feel trapped in.</p>
</blockquote>
Mars After Midnight2021-08-22T04:51:42Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/mars-after-midnight/<p><a href="https://dukope.com/">Lucas Pope</a> has been writing intermittently about the development of his new game, <a href="https://dukope.itch.io/mars-after-midnight/devlog/285964/working-in-one-bit">Mars After Midnight</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Working in 1-bit for this game has been interesting. Going in, I thought my experience with Obra Dinn would let me cruise through the visuals. Typical devlog setup, so let me describe in detail how wrong that thought was.</p>
<p>Turns out that rendering 3D content in grayscale with realtime post-processing to 1-bit is a totally different thing from making well-crafted 2D art. Most of my existing skillset and pipeline has been almost useless.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Look at <a href="https://dukope.itch.io/mars-after-midnight/devlog/263965/making-martian-faces">how Lucas generated the faces of each monster</a>, too! There’s powerful blogging-whilst-working energy here. And I’m just so excited about this new game for the Playdate since <a href="https://obradinn.com/"><em>Return of the Obra Dinn</em></a> is one of my favorite games of all time.</p>
<p>Subscribed!</p>
An Ode to BART2021-08-21T01:48:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/an-ode-to-bart/<p>Oh what a beautiful thing it is. Yesterday I snuck out of my apartment and hopped aboard BART—a series of snaking underground and above-ground lines that link the city of San Francisco to the East Bay—and it might’ve been for the first time in nearly two years.</p>
<p>I had forgotten what a delight it is to abandon a car, to be untethered from a motorcycle. I had forgotten what it was like to grab a backpack and at a moment’s notice simply walk onto a station, hop on a train, and boom—you’re in a whole other place.</p>
<p>All those trains! London, Plymouth, Nottingham, Reading, Paris, Berlin. I had no idea how much I took them all for granted because my late teens and twenties were dominated by trains; I practically lived on the line between Plymouth and London, then Plymouth and Nottingham. And on those trains I can’t imagine how many miles of hedge rows and seaside towns I’ve seen whip pass the window as my nose was glued to a book, my eyes only peeking out over the top every once in a while.</p>
<p>The reading! Reading is most certainly the best part of any train ride. There’s no car sickness, no cramped feeling of being stuck in a seat. There’s just books and books and books on a train.</p>
<p>I haven’t ever been able to put this into words so please bare with me and it’s difficult to grasp the scale of it all until you’re here in America—but one of the worst things about this place is the car culture. Roads dominate the landscape and pedestrians aren’t even an afterthought. I remember looking at a beach not so long ago—a five minute walk at best—and saying to someone “I’m walking to the beach.” And the person turned to me and said “You can’t. You need a car to get over there.” I laughed at the ridiculousness of that but I realized they weren’t joking. There was simply no path for people to walk on over there.</p>
<p>This is going to sound melodramatic but outside of SF it truly feels as if the whole country has been built without people in mind. And yet because of the sheer accessibility of our trains in the UK, it wasn’t odd for me to live without a driver’s license at all. Why would I need one? I happily chose the train each and every time.</p>
<p>And even if motorcycles are punk rock as hell, a train is something else; a train is a place where serious reading can be done.</p>
The Healing Power of JavaScript2021-08-20T22:29:17Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-healing-power-of-javascript/<p>I love this note from Craig about how <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/healing-power-javascript-code-programming/">working on your website is an act of stewardship</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This work of line-by-line problem solving gets me out of bed some days. Do you know this feeling? The not-wanting-to-emerge-from-the-covers feeling? Every single morning of the last year may have been the most collectively experienced covers-craving in human history, where so many things in the world were off by a degree here or a degree there. But under those covers I begin to think—A ha! I know how to solve server problem x, or quirk y. I know how to fix that search code. And I'm able to emerge and become human, or part human, and enter into that line-by-line world, where there is very little judgement, just you and the mechanics of the systems, systems that become increasingly beautiful the more time you spend with them. For me, this stewardship is therapy.</p>
</blockquote>
MD Nichrome2021-08-18T03:23:39Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/md-nichrome/<p><a href="https://nichrome.mass-driver.com/">MD Nichrome</a> is a new type family from Mass-Driver and boy howdy does it look wondrous. I love the marketing website for it with all the flashy-as-hell animations showing just how flexible Nichrome is. Some of those animations are made with a python library called <a href="https://coldtype.goodhertz.com/">Cold Type</a>. Never heard of it before, but sure looks neat.</p>
<p>Gah! If you scroll down the page to the blue section the background starts to fuzz a bit like an old TV which I absolutely adore. It gives this sense of texture and age, which basically all websites lack. It’s a small detail but it’s perfect for the look and feel of Nichrome.</p>
<p>Double gah! Look at that footer.</p>
<p>Of course I hit Inspect Element and scrolled around a bit, noticing that—<em>huh</em>—isn’t it neat that today you can see the design tokens of modern websites like this?</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">:root</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">--black</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> #000000<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--night</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> #112233<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--cobalt</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> #3050ff<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--rhubarb</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> #d46379<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--tangerine</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> #fa935e<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--straw</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> #dccc9c<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--sage</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> #cccec3<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--off-white</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> #eeeae5<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--v-margin</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 100px<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--h-margin</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 75px<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--gutter</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 25px<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--text</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> <span class="token function">var</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>--black<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--background</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> <span class="token function">var</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>--off-white<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--wght</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 92<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--slnt</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 0<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>These are CSS custom variables and I just wrote about <a href="https://css-tricks.com/newsletter/264-inline-css-custom-properties-and-handy-dandy-tools/">how neat they are for the CSS-Tricks newsletter</a>—but!—I didn’t think about how it’s like a sneak peek into the visual rules of a website.</p>
<p>You can take a look at mine on this very website, too:</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">:root</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">--color-background</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> #111<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--color-border</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> #222<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--color-title</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> #fff<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--color-text</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> #bbb<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--color-subtext</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> #777<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--color-faded</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> #444<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--color-link</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> #fe7b53<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--color-backgroundNav</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> #000<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--spacing</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 20px<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--base-font-size</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> <span class="token function">clamp</span><span class="token punctuation">(</span>100%<span class="token punctuation">,</span> 1rem + 0.5vw<span class="token punctuation">,</span> 21px<span class="token punctuation">)</span><span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--font-fallback</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> -apple-system<span class="token punctuation">,</span> BlinkMacSystemFont<span class="token punctuation">,</span> <span class="token string">"Segoe UI"</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span> Roboto<span class="token punctuation">,</span><br /> Helvetica<span class="token punctuation">,</span> Arial<span class="token punctuation">,</span> sans-serif<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">--header-height</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 45px<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><br /> <span class="token atrule"><span class="token rule">@media</span> screen <span class="token keyword">and</span> <span class="token punctuation">(</span><span class="token property">min-width</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 767px<span class="token punctuation">)</span></span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">--header-height</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 50px<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>I’m doing some whacky stuff I shouldn’t be doing with the <code>--header-height</code> variable in my <code>global.scss</code> file. But it’s neat you can do even that in the first place (even if I shouldn’t be because it makes for some weird-lookin’ and fragile CSS)!</p>
<p>Anyway. MD Nichrome rules. CSS custom properties rule. That is all.</p>
Text on a Curve2021-08-15T15:50:17Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/text-on-a-curve/<p>Nick Sherman’s flickr group called <a href="https://www.flickr.com/groups/textonacurve/">Text on a Curve</a> is just neat as hell. And this example from Patricia is especially beautiful; <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/taffeta/4924587795/in/pool-textonacurve/">The Fan Safety Matches</a>.</p>
<p>I’ve never set text on a curve because getting it right is so damn hard, so I also loved the description of all the different ways to set text like this in the Group Description section; rotate, arch, fan, and distort.</p>
<p>I’m sure I’ll come back to this diagram at some point soon.</p>
Sentry Hackweek 20212021-08-13T23:31:15Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/sentry-hackweek-2021/<p>Hackweek just wrapped up at Sentry and it’s always a lot of fun. There’s so many weird projects from so many smart weirdos. Today I watched someone skate around SF on bioluminescent rollerblades whilst another smart chap walked through their AI generated risograph art. It’s inspiring and yet also intimidating at the same time to be in company like this.</p>
<p>For my project I wanted to prototype something that’s been missing in the Sentry app, a boring feature that isn’t ever going to woo anyone but it’s important nonetheless: notifications.</p>
<p>Generally, notifications are annoying and bad. They hijack your focus and misdirect your attention (the first thing I do when I get a new device is turn off all the notifications). But, weirdly enough, by not having notifications within the Sentry app we’re actually making the noise problem worse. That’s because today folks can only get notifications about the code they’ve broken via email and I don’t know about you but my inbox is a precious thing. I don’t want to get spammed with a million different messages about Sentry stuff that I can deal with later.</p>
<p>That’s why in-app notifications are important (although extremely boring). So to counteract the boring-ness of this hackweek project I made a video that explains everything:</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ws7l0B9yp8k" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>For the demo website I made <a href="http://thefuturetomorrow.today/">thefuturetomorrow.today</a> and built it with Astro. And I know I’ve been moaning a little bit about it lately but, for a project like this, Astro is absolutely incredible. It’s so dang nice to be able to to use components just like React and give them props but without having to load a gigantic pile of JavaScript at the same time.</p>
<p>For the homepage of this thing I could write the following:</p>
<pre class="language-javascript"><code class="language-javascript"><span class="token operator"><</span>AppWrapper<span class="token operator">></span><br /> <span class="token operator"><</span>Header<span class="token operator">></span><br /> <span class="token operator"><</span>Tabs<span class="token operator">></span><br /> <span class="token operator"><</span>TabItem unread<span class="token operator">=</span><span class="token punctuation">{</span><span class="token number">40</span><span class="token punctuation">}</span> url<span class="token operator">=</span><span class="token string">"/"</span> active<span class="token operator">></span><br /> All<br /> <span class="token operator"><</span><span class="token operator">/</span>TabItem<span class="token operator">></span><br /> <span class="token operator"><</span>TabItem unread<span class="token operator">=</span><span class="token punctuation">{</span><span class="token number">12</span><span class="token punctuation">}</span> url<span class="token operator">=</span><span class="token string">"/alerts"</span><span class="token operator">></span><br /> Alerts<br /> <span class="token operator"><</span><span class="token operator">/</span>TabItem<span class="token operator">></span><br /> <span class="token operator"><</span>TabItem unread<span class="token operator">=</span><span class="token punctuation">{</span><span class="token number">7</span><span class="token punctuation">}</span> url<span class="token operator">=</span><span class="token string">"/workflow"</span><span class="token operator">></span><br /> Workflow<br /> <span class="token operator"><</span><span class="token operator">/</span>TabItem<span class="token operator">></span><br /> <span class="token operator"><</span>TabItem unread<span class="token operator">=</span><span class="token punctuation">{</span><span class="token number">6</span><span class="token punctuation">}</span> url<span class="token operator">=</span><span class="token string">"/account"</span><span class="token operator">></span><br /> Account<br /> <span class="token operator"><</span><span class="token operator">/</span>TabItem<span class="token operator">></span><br /> <span class="token operator"><</span>TabItem unread<span class="token operator">=</span><span class="token punctuation">{</span><span class="token number">2</span><span class="token punctuation">}</span> url<span class="token operator">=</span><span class="token string">"/new"</span><span class="token operator">></span><br /> What’s New<br /> <span class="token operator"><</span><span class="token operator">/</span>TabItem<span class="token operator">></span><br /> <span class="token operator"><</span><span class="token operator">/</span>Tabs<span class="token operator">></span><br /> <span class="token operator"><</span><span class="token operator">/</span>Header<span class="token operator">></span><br /> <span class="token operator"><</span>Filters <span class="token operator">/</span><span class="token operator">></span><br /> <span class="token operator"><</span>Table<span class="token operator">></span><br /> <span class="token operator"><</span>Notification<br /> title<span class="token operator">=</span><span class="token string">"Approve Request"</span><br /> desc<span class="token operator">=</span><span class="token string">"Jane Schmidt wants to join the #workflow team"</span><br /> type<span class="token operator">=</span><span class="token string">"Account"</span><br /> time<span class="token operator">=</span><span class="token string">"1 minute ago"</span><br /> <span class="token operator">/</span><span class="token operator">></span><br /> <span class="token operator"><</span><span class="token operator">/</span>Table<span class="token operator">></span><br /><span class="token operator"><</span><span class="token operator">/</span>AppWrapper<span class="token operator">></span></code></pre>
<p>Because of how fast this all loads under the hood, it feels more web-component-y than it does JavaScript framework-y to me. And that’s an enormous compliment.</p>
<p>Here’s a link to the repo if you’re interested in taking a stroll around: <a href="https://github.com/robinrendle/hackweek-notifications">robinrendle/hackweek-notifications</a>. There’s some naff JavaScript in there for the dismiss actions and what not but it all works! Plus, being able to see a feature like this that looks real is sometimes more helpful than a Figma mockup.</p>
<p>Anyway, building stuff with Astro like this is just a lovely way to work. And now: bed.</p>
The Annosphere2021-08-13T18:48:48Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-annosphere/<p><a href="http://www.annosphere.com/">Cool cool cool</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The annosphere is a sundial that works without the sun. It shows you the time of day and the time of year as well. It keeps track of the changing seasons and models sunrise and sunset for each day, for any place on earth.</p>
<p>The annosphere tells time, but more usefully, it presents time. It shows you sunrise and sunset, the start of spring and the winter solstice. It lets you see on your desk what you can’t see in the world: the steady pace of time, the subtle day to day changes in sunlight and shadow, the cycles that run through each year.</p>
</blockquote>
How Not To Be A Jerk2021-08-12T16:31:42Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/how-not-to-be-a-jerk/<p>I’ve had a few folks I admire message me over the years and infrequently it’s a bummer—gasp! wow this person is reaching out!—only to find out that they’re a bit of a jerk.</p>
<p>But I’m never quite so sure how to deal with a jerk that I admire.</p>
<p>Jerks that are strangers? That’s easy. Walk away from snarky tweets or shitty comments because there’s ten billion other things to be doing with your time. Unfollow, unfollow, unfollow. No one else besides you should get to ruin your day.</p>
<p>But jerks that I admire? Ugh. I feel like I have a moral obligation to say “hey pal, you’re being a real tiny fucker right now with that snarky, whiney language and just because you have a bunch of followers and a few books under your belt doesn’t give you the right to be an ass hat.”</p>
<p>Walking away from those snarky messages and comments feels like enabling their toxic behavior.</p>
<p>Not so long ago I got an email from someone who used to be a hero of mine. I read all their books and watched all their interviews. I was absolutely positively smitten with them. But, over time, things changed. Their behavior and language became obviously toxic and unnecessarily cruel. I could no longer call them a hero. I unfollowed them, untangled my online life from theirs.</p>
<p>But then they emailed me out of the blue.</p>
<p>I remember getting the email and thinking (loudly) “woof, my dude.” They were correcting me on a few small points I’d made in a blog post but they sort of misunderstood what I was saying (I could’ve clearer, to be fair) but they took all that dumb playfulness out of my original work and started to belittle me on semantics.</p>
<p>Oh, all the ways to reply! I could destroy them with a tweet, or a well worded riposte in iambic pentameter, I could slam dunk their cruelty from the walled fortifications of my newsletter.</p>
<p>I fantasized about all that for a good long while. Then one day I just archived their message. There’s no need for that person to take up any more space in my brain than is absolutely necessary and telling them that they’re being an asshat is extremely unlikely to convince them to stop.</p>
<p>But now I feel bad that I never replied. I’m sort of...morally culpable for the next person they abuse in a horrible and snarky email. They couldn’t do anything to my career and so I’m basically invulnerable to their vitriol and their power. And because of that, I feel like I have a responsibility of some kind to make sure that people in less fortunate positions don’t get bullied by them.</p>
<p>Replying to ass hats also tells them that their behavior is unacceptable. Even if it’s an email. Even if it’s the smallest thing.</p>
Redesign: The Source of Truth2021-08-12T05:00:29Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/redesign-the-source-of-truth/<p>One of the things I regret with my website is using a third party newsletter service for Adventures. Or, at least not archiving things properly.</p>
<p>For years I used Buttondown—an excellent service that lets you write email newsletters—and I still love it to death, but I’d get lazy about migrating content out of it. Every so often I’d copy and paste the markdown into a new file with Eleventy and then duplicate the post for my site at /adventures.</p>
<p>But lately, as I started migrating all my content from Eleventy to Astro, I realized that all the links to images just aren’t going to stick around:</p>
<pre><code><img src="https://buttondown.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/images/4834578b" />
</code></pre>
<p>Buttondown would upload my image to S3 and then when I exported it I didn’t think about the images at all. So now I’m kinda stuck with a ton of blog posts that are going to die eventually. An S3 thingy will change and all these blog posts will become cryptic and basically useless without the images.</p>
<p>Whenever I start a new writing project I need to make sure that I can export whatever content I make here into a third party thing like Buttondown, rather than the other way round. Because I hope my personal website will be around longer than basically every other service or platform or what have you.</p>
<p>This website should be the source of truth, not the other way around.</p>
Redesign: Everything Broke2021-08-11T16:41:22Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/2021-08-11-redesign-everything-broke/<p>Okay, so. I spent far too long trying to push my build of Astro via Netlify.</p>
<p>Netlify is where I host my site and it automatically detects when a commit is made in GitHub. It’ll then run a build command which will tell Astro to do it’s magic and turn a bunch of Markdown files into plain ol’ HTML.</p>
<p>But each time I pushed my code to GitHub, Netlify would detect that and then try to auto-deploy those changes and something would break.</p>
<p>What broke? No idea. The logs were impossible to read. That’s one problem with Astro right now: just trying to understand what you broke is difficult to see.</p>
<p>I’m sure this will be fixed eventually but it means I have to cautiously make any change, no matter how small. Change the markup, watch the command line. Change the font, watch the command line; because the slightest thing might break.</p>
<p>When I started this redesign project I wasn’t so cautious and when I tried to push my site to Netlify it broke in the most calamitous way imaginable. Perhaps things weren’t building right because I’m on the wrong version of Astro, I thought. So I updated to the latest version of Astro in my package.json.</p>
<p>Now, I’m not really familiar with juggling dependencies but it only took me thirty seconds to realize this was a really bad idea after I hit <code>npm install</code>. This is because a ton of breaking changes had been made since I updated the version of Astro I was on.</p>
<p>And I only started this project a few weeks ago!</p>
<p>There were tons of changes I had to make, and some substantial ones that didn’t make any sense to me at the time. Now the rather simple component structure required that I know more JavaScript than I really do (TypeScript – ah!). So I had to spend another couple of days reading the changelog and then updating everything to compensate for the changes.</p>
<p>This made me real mad at the time because I thought I had finished what’s a relatively simple blog redesign. But ultimately this is the price you have to pay for choosing a technology like Astro that’s still shifting under your feet. Everything is certainly getting better all the time! But — and here’s the real kicker — what looks like an obvious improvement to you is an incredibly annoying waste of time for, well, me.</p>
<p>I was mad at myself, really. I hadn’t taken into consideration that Astro is not even at v1 yet and so of course everything about it is likely to change whilst I’m building my website. Thankfully I’ve got to a point where I’m feeling okay-ish about it all now. I’m still confused about how to create feeds and adding Typescript to my blog feels like overkill.</p>
<p>But it reminded me that for really important stuff (my website is more important than almost everything I own), you need to pick a technology on firm ground. No big changes, nothing that rocks the boat. You want your software to be predictable and not punk rock because being punk rock means that you have to keep up with stuff breaking and not making sense and half-written documentation for stuff.</p>
<p>All of this is not an inditement against Astro. It’s more a criticism of my own expectations; I looked at a shiny box full of technology and assumed it would fix all my problems. Whereas, really, it just shifted those problems about.</p>
<p>When I picked Astro I thought I’d get all the benefits of 11ty and then some. But this really isn’t the case. Astro doesn’t let you make a single unified RSS feed (easily) and then create a very specific file at the root of your website (like <code>feed.xml</code>). So something that’s fundamental to my website is now busted with no workaround I can think of other than doing a bunch of 301 redirects that I have to add to Netlify. This broke my RSS feed and made it look like I had a very productive evening of blogging.</p>
<p>As I was struggling with my website I read this piece by Jeremy about <a href="https://adactio.com/journal/18337">building complicated websites</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You can choose to make it really complicated. Convince yourself that “the modern web” is inherently complex and convoluted. But then look at what makes it complex and convoluted: toolchains, build tools, pipelines, frameworks, libraries, and abstractions. Please try to remember that none of those things are required to make a website.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ugh. This is how Astro now feels to me. I sort of regret doing all this work to shift my website over from 11ty only to realize that I don’t think I need all the extra superpowers that Astro unlocks. I mean, I still love Astro. It’s incredible and cool and shiny. But for my website...I need something with strong foundations. I need boring technology to encourage me to write, to mess around with words on the internet.</p>
<p>For now I’ll sit on any big changes, despite my current mopeyness, and keep Astro here until v1.0. But this was a good and rather painful lesson to learn.</p>
Stress Systems.2021-08-10T23:54:09Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/2021-08-10-stress-systems/<p>Ethan on <a href="https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/stress-systems/">stress and design systems</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You don’t start by fixing the system. You start by relieving the stress.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I made a snarky tweet some time ago that’s <em>somewhat</em> related to this, although I hadn’t identified the feeling with stress. But when it comes to design system it’s so easy to keep listing all the things we need to do! There’s the buttons! The awful accessibility problems! The colors! The typography! Agggh! Stress!</p>
<p>A while back I realized that a genuine problem with design systems work at first is <em>seeing</em> the system. It’s just all too overwhelming, and you’ll then make other folks feel overwhelmed in the process of describing this enormous broken thing to them. If anything, identifying the problem makes more people less willing to address it. What the what?</p>
<p>To fix the system you need to relieve the stress, <em>yes yes yes</em>, but to do that you need to stop seeing the system. You need to pick one tiny thing—let’s say it’s using <a href="https://alistapart.com/article/web-typography-numerals/">lining figures in tables</a>. Fixed that? Great. Then pick the next thing.</p>
<p>The same is true of politics, too. We see this overwhelming system of bullshit and we panic at the sheer size of all these problems when combined together. But we must pick the smallest problem first. Then the next. Then the next.</p>
Does this work?2021-08-06T20:40:03Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/does-this-work/<p>I definitely broke the RSS feed with this but I finally moved all my posts into Astro, updated the images, rewrote basically every page and all the CSS from scratch, and managed to get it through my perhaps too complex build process.</p>
<p>It’s weird having a broken blog for two weeks. I feel this big chunk of me missing, a loss of <em>oomph!</em> and <em>vroom!</em> So I need to fix that.</p>
<p>But before I do, I need to fix my RSS feed.</p>
Back to the Future with RSS2021-07-23T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/back-to-the-future-with-rss/<p>Nicky Case writes about <a href="https://ncase.me/rss/">why RSS was so damn good</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Imagine an open version of Twitter or Facebook News Feed, with no psy-op ads, owned by no oligopoly, manipulated by no algorithm, and all under your full control.</p>
<p>Imagine a version of the newsletter where you don't have to worry about them selling your email to scammers, labyrinth-like unsubscribe pages, or stuffing your inbox with ever more crap.</p>
<p>Now imagine this existed and was extremely popular 15 years ago. Then we got suckered by the shiny walled gardens.</p>
<p>Well, it's time to make like a tree and go back to the future, baby!</p>
</blockquote>
Crease2021-07-22T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/crease/<p>I’m sat at my desk crying. A beautiful light is washing over the bay right now and I’m crying because his name was Crease and he was a good boy. The boyest of boys, the goodest of goods.</p>
<p>We named him Crease because of the tuft of hair that parted his face right down the middle like a kinder egg. Look, you can faintly see it here:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/crease-1.jpg" alt="A picture of Crease, looking up at me with those enormously kind eyes" /></p>
<p>Look at his eyes! They were, of course, enormous like his sister’s (her name was Marbles—the Rendles are only good at naming dogs and that is all)—his eyes were planet-sized saucers that jutted out of his face so much that he constantly looked shocked by everything and at all times. He was always a punctuation mark at the beginning, middle, and end of a sentence; a loud and joyous and heart-felt !</p>
<p>And yet that dog was 14 years old and not once did I see him blink.</p>
<p>Also, holy shit was he a specimen. Crease was a horse-like creature sent from the God of Good Boys to show other good boys how to live without a care in the world. And he was immune to pain. I would be sat in my bedroom, brooding, listening to Nine Inch Nails and hating everything in the world and from downstairs I could hear the constant BANG BANG BANG of his tail as he moved from one room to the next, smashing everything with that pure, unadulterated joy of his as he went. One day on the moor I saw him jump right into a bush of nettles at high speed, darting around inside, only to appear a minute later with tiny brambles stuck in him. He didn’t even notice. He was too busy !!!-ing.</p>
<p>That beautiful boy was a preposterous beast; towering above the herd and built like a tank designed by goths, he would get home after a long walk and rush to find his little toy cow. In that way he was like me. Powerful, unstoppable, better than everyone else, of course. But the world could not be navigated without that small thing; that little toy cow.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/crease-2.jpg" alt="Crease with his tiny toy cow" /></p>
<p>But goddamn is it a beautiful evening tonight, even with all the crying. Tonight is an evening of evenings. A worthy end for the boy of boys.</p>
<p>He would have loved this place, this evening; the sun is rising over the hills, the air is crisp and warm. I know that he would stand at my window and glare at everyone on the street, not out of anger but out of friendship—there’s so many potential new friends right out there! Do you see them all!</p>
<p>Do you see!</p>
Redesign: Content Migration2021-07-12T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/redesign-content-migration/<p>Well, moving everything over from Eleventy to Astro is a little trickier than I first imagined. I’ve spent the last two days moving content around, updating the frontmatter, learning about Astro’s approach to CSS. It certainly is liberating to write a bunch of CSS in a file and it be automatically scoped to the HTML in that same file, without it leaking out into other things.</p>
<p>Like if I write...</p>
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css"><span class="token selector">body</span> <span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">background</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> red<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>Then only the <code><body></code> element on that page will be red. That’s just neato.</p>
<p>There have been some cases where the styles accidentally bleed into other pages but I expect that’s a bug? This is definitely a project that’s in early access.</p>
<p>But I do worry that buying into the Astro ecosystem is not a great long term solution for my site. If this project dies or goes away, I’ll have to migrate all this content again to whatever <em>new</em> way of building a blog is. There’s a lot of trust I’m putting into the folks building this thing.</p>
Why is file manipulation so hard?2021-07-10T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/why-is-file-manipulation-so-hard/<p>So I don’t know bash. But why do I need to learn it to, say, grab all the files in a folder and prepend some text to the beginning? Why if I want to do anything with files or text or manipulate any file into another kind of file I always have to download some other third party app or find some weird script somewhere?</p>
<p>All computers do is take a file, turn it into another kind of file, or edit/delete/etc. They manipulate one form of data into something else.</p>
<p>If that’s the case then why do I still need to learn how to use bash in 2021? It seems so archaic to me. There should be an app (kinda like <a href="https://software.charliemonroe.net/permute/">Permute</a>) that lets me manipulate text documents.</p>
<p>It’s like all the power of this computer is locked behind a pane of glass, just because I don’t want to memorize or learn this dumbass language that is barely readable. I don’t want to have to dig through <code>man</code> docs. I don’t want to create a script and then run it.</p>
<p>I want all the power of coding without any of the coding.</p>
<p>Make the computer meet me where I am.</p>
Redesign: Moving to Astro2021-07-10T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/redesign-moving-to-astro/<p>Okay, so we’re moving the ol’ site from Eleventy to Astro. I think what finally convinced me to make the switch was, of all things, gulp.</p>
<p>gulp is an important tool to automate stuff like image optimization, JavaScript minification, and Sass processing. But lately I’ve found myself increasingly frustrated by having to build a pipeline of tasks to do that stuff.</p>
<p>Every six months or so I’d have to devote a day to fixing whatever I’ve broken — dependencies would break, things would bust randomly. Instead of writing stuff or improving things I would constantly have to keep up as the foundations of things shifted over time.</p>
<p>I want to avoid all dependency management on my personal site.</p>
<p>And I wanted to play around with Astro, any who. We’ve been talking about it a lot over on CSS-Tricks lately and for good reason: <a href="https://css-tricks.com/a-look-at-building-with-astro/">it’s extremely nifty</a>.</p>
<p>The problem with switching to Astro is that I have to move over a thousand plus blog posts and a half dozen essays with custom CSS for each. It’s not too much work but it’s a bit of a faff.</p>
<p>For instance I had to go through each markdown file and let Astro know which layout to use. So I had to use bash to do that (hence <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/why-is-file-manipulation-so-hard">my rant last night</a>):</p>
<pre><code>---
layout: layouts/note.njk
title: A Blog Post
// other stuff
---
// Blog post content goes here
</code></pre>
<p>Just adding that first line to a thousand files is way harder than it ought to be. I’m probably doing something wrong here but <em>man</em> it’s annoying to have to use the command line to manipulate text docs. Feels like the 1960s to me. This was the command I used:</p>
<pre><code>find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec sed -i.bk '2i \
layout: ../../layouts/post.astro
' {} \;
</code></pre>
<p>ANYWAY. I gotta make sure that I move all the content correctly with this change. URLs are the most important thing to preserve, but I want to make sure that I move over all the fonts and nothing in my deploy to Netlify breaks. Oh, and I’m 1000% certain I’m gonna break the RSS feed, too.</p>
<p>Wish me luck. And sorry in advance.</p>
Redesign: Measure Once2021-07-07T02:50:23Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/redesign-measure-once/<p>The most important thing about any website is the measure. Okay, so that’s a lie. It’s not the most important thing but it most certainly is a <em>thing</em>. The measure is the fancy typesetting word for the width of a paragraph. Ah!—that reminds me—years ago I wrote a piece called <a href="https://css-tricks.com/six-tips-for-better-web-typography/">Six tips for better web typography</a> where I talked about all this stuff:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For some reason, a lot of folks tend to think that paragraphs on smaller devices require a larger line-height value — but this isn’t the case! Because the width of paragraphs are smaller, line-height can be even smaller than you might on desktop displays. That’s because on smaller screens, and with smaller paragraphs, the reader’s eye has a much shorter distance to hop from the end of one line to the beginning of the next.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This post reminds me that line-height, font-size, and measure are really 3 sides of the same coin when it comes to typesetting; if you change one then you must plan on fixing the other two. With that in mind, let’s go ahead and fix the measure temporarily with the <code>max-width</code> CSS property. I’m gonna do that from within <a href="https://github.com/robinrendle/robinrendle.com/blob/a4c230d0d089b80bf2d51008a9a7ea57796118d4/_includes/layouts/default.html">my default layout</a> which is the template that Eleventy uses for blog posts (like the one you’re reading right now).</p>
<p>The default layout consists of a <code><header></code> and an <code><article></code>. Should the <code><header></code> go inside the <code><article></code>? <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/header">According to MDN</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The <code><header></code> HTML element represents introductory content, typically a group of introductory or navigational aids. It may contain some heading elements but also a logo, a search form, an author name, and other elements.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Mmmmm. Okay so I guess I should only use a single header on the page? Years ago there was a ton of hubbub about having a <code><hgroup></code> element but that sort of disappeared as far as I can remember. Looks like a header should only contain the main navigation and the logo.</p>
<p>So no <code><header></code> in my default layout, got it. All I need then is something like this:</p>
<pre><code><article>
<!-- time goes here -->
<h1>Title of blog post</h1>
<!-- blog post content -->
</article>
<!-- links and what not -->
</code></pre>
<p>That makes sense to me. I guess the question now is: do we add the container that will set our max-width on the <code>article</code> or wrap the whole page? I think for now let’s just wrap the whole page since as the design of the site matures a bit and I start to think more about grids I can fix that separately.</p>
<p>Mmmmm...if I do that then not all pages in the site will be affected. Ya know what? Let’s just set this on the body for now and be done with it.</p>
<pre><code>body {
padding: 0 10px;
max-width: 45rem;
}
</code></pre>
<p>With <code>padding: 0 10px;</code> we now have a bit of padding on mobile devices (which is what I want to focus on right now). But how did I come up with <code>45rem</code>? I just made it up and eyeballed it quickly on desktop. Eh, it looks good enough for now.</p>
<p>None of this is likely to stay though because I’ll be sure to focus more on visual design later. Let’s just make things easier to read first and then make them fancy afterwards.</p>
Designing in Public2021-07-06T15:39:09Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/designing-in-public/<p>Because of, you know—the omens—I’ve started working on a new design again. I’m not entirely sure what version I’m up to at this point but it doesn’t really matter. With each iteration of this website I feel like I’m getting closer to what it ought to be.</p>
<p>But! I want to do things differently this time: I’m updating the styles of this site slowly over time. Each time you pop back here something will be different. One night I’ll tidy up the copy, the next I’ll be fixing up the font-sizes, adding margins. Last night I spent an hour switching out the fonts to use <a href="https://klim.co.nz/retail-fonts/national-2/">National 2</a> again and I deleted all the CSS. So no longer do I have classes like...</p>
<pre class="language-html"><code class="language-html"><span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"><</span>div</span> <span class="token attr-name">class</span><span class="token attr-value"><span class="token punctuation attr-equals">=</span><span class="token punctuation">"</span>wrapper-wide wrapper-wide--grid wrapper-wide--grid-reverse<span class="token punctuation">"</span></span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span><span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"></</span>div</span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span></code></pre>
<p>...which has plagued this here website for far too long.</p>
<p>Starting again feels exciting though. There’s a lot of fancy new CSS things I can mess around with, lots of dependencies I have to update. Actually, here’s a list of all the things I need to do with this version of the site:</p>
<ul>
<li>Delete the CSS: lots of clunky styles and markup patterns that I have here.</li>
<li>Design mobile first: I’ve always designed things from desktop down, rather than mobile up. I expect most folks read my site via their phones though and so I should take more care of the design on those devices.</li>
<li>Perfect typography: with that said, I want the typesetting on mobile to be <em>perfect</em> and I think I’ve just ignored it for the longest time. I’ve never got mobile type just right so I’m going to be staring at my phone for a month to polish things up.</li>
<li>Subscribe via email: I probably should let folks subscribe to /notes via email because #engagement but...it feels wrong. My rants here don’t feel important enough to notify someone of via email and RSS always feels like a quieter space for relationship drama and half-baked font appreciation.</li>
<li>Switch the CMS: I feel like <a href="https://www.netlifycms.org/">Netlify CMS</a> is a tiny bit too clunky for using it in the way that I do. But maybe I should just contribute to that project? I haven’t thought much about it yet. We’ll see.</li>
<li>Use Astro(?): right now this website is powered by <a href="https://www.11ty.dev/">Eleventy</a> which is wondrous but I do want to experiment with <a href="https://astro.build/">Astro</a> at some point soon. But it would slow things down a lot at the beginning I expect.</li>
<li>Update the fonts: goes without saying.</li>
</ul>
Omens2021-07-06T15:32:08Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/roam/<p>It starts with the jaw; wires taught, grinding teeth, clenched muscles running up and down each cheek. I catch myself biting my lower lip and pulling funny faces in an effort to release the tension. But where is all this stress coming from?</p>
<p>For me, there’s no apocalypse. Nothing bad is looming on the horizon and yet my body is looking for disaster, a great tragedy, the end of days.</p>
<p>Except right now I’m extraordinarily happy. Happier than I’ve ever been, really. For the first time in my life I have a stable home and a loving partner. I have a great job and my career is plodding along. If you told me ten years ago that I’d be here, sat at this very desk, I’d disappear in a puff of smoke.</p>
<p>But if everything’s so fine and dandy then why is body responding in this way? Why do I feel as if there’s some ill fortune destined to befall me when I wake up? And why in the absolute eff is my jaw clamping up like this?</p>
<p>Celine asked me why I’m feeling like this and I said perhaps it’s because I have skin in the game now. She laughed and rolled her eyes a bit because I was half joking. But it’s true! I have so much to be thankful right now but also so very much to lose. With great power comes great responsibility (and myriad ways to disappoint the ones you love).</p>
<p>Yes, yes yes, I know what my therapist might say. “This is a <em>complex</em> due to an uncertain childhood. You don’t want to be made a fool of when something terrible happens and it’s absolutely due to your relationship with stress and how you think it makes you more intelligent, more powerful, more useful the more stressed you are. If you’re stressed then no-one can hoodwink you and nothing can ever be taken away.”</p>
<p>And to that, I’d say: shut up, therapy.</p>
Timefulness2021-06-25T16:49:57Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/timefulness/<p>I just finished reading Marcia Bjornerud’s <em>Timefulness</em> this morning. Marcia writes about Deep Time of the past— mountain formation and the Cambrian explosion—and Deep Time of the future—the disappearance of the Atlantic ocean and the rush of America into Europe and the creation of a single mega continent a few hundred million years from now.</p>
<p>She writes about how we’ve become “time-blind”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>With no appetite for stories lacking human protagonists, many people simply can’t be bothered with natural history. We are thus both intemperate and intemp_o_rate—time illiterate. Like inexperienced but overconfident drivers, we accelerate into landscapes and ecosystems with no sense of their long-established traffic patterns, and then react with surprise and indignation when we face the penalties for ignoring natural laws. This ignorance of planetary history undermines any claims we may make to modernity.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There’s something extremely good about Marcia’s work that reminds me what I love in any good chunk of writing: she makes the very small connect to the very large...</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I often feel I live not just in Wisconsin but in many Wisconsins. Even when I try not to, I can’t help but sense the lingering influence of the many natural and human histories embedded in this landscape: the forests still recovering from nineteenth-century clear-cutting; the rivers that governed ancient trade routes, themselves shaped by moraines shoved up by the great ice sheets; the golden sandstones marking the shores of the Paleozoic seas; contorted gneisses that are the surviving roots of Proterozoic mountains. The Ordovician is not a dim abstraction; I was there with students just the other day! For geologists, every outcrop is a portal to an earlier world.</p>
</blockquote>
Just link!2021-06-20T20:57:57Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/just-link/<p>Sloan explains why his newsletter is <a href="https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/just-link/">just a link</a> to a post on his website:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My enthusiasm for the approach is related to my enthusiasm for the potential of the web page circa 2021. Typography, layout, inline interaction… a bunch of things have finally clicked into place, and it’s honestly a joy these days to make a web page. (Note that I said “web page,” not “web app.” Whole different situation.) Was it absolutely necessary for the illustration in this post to be a live 3D animation, three.js happily chugging along? No. Do I think it’s cool that it is? Yes!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I like this approach a whole lot.</p>
<p>Newsletters are still a very good thing but there is a samey-ness that I’ve noticed. I see this as the Radiolab Effect: a very popular format takes hold of the medium until everyone thinks that’s the only way to make a podcast/website/whatever. They think that a podcast can be nothing more than that <em>dog woofing, leaf crunching, old dude: “there’s a lot of mysterious stuff going on in this town, and I always knew it” train sounds “Eerie, Wyoming is only a six hour train ride from the nearest pub, and it’s home to just one resident...” more barking, more leaf crunching, man wheezing sounds ”...Peter.”</em> kind of format.</p>
<p>Newsletters have their format now and what I love about Sloan’s just-throw-a-link-in-the-email approach is that it allows for variation and weirdness, or at least it feels like it has more potential than your typical friendly neighborhood newsletter.</p>
The web is too damn complex2021-06-18T23:58:48Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/necessary-complexity/<p>For the newsletter last week I jotted down <a href="https://css-tricks.com/newsletter/255-thoughts-on-astro/">some quick thoughts about Astro</a>—it’s a static site generator that lets you build with React/Vue/Svelte components but then it produces plain ol’ HTML and CSS:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I guess that’s what’s so exciting to me: the philosophy behind Astro, more so than just what it is today.</p>
<p>It’s a hopeful vision of a future web where we’re not limited by past technical decisions and our users aren’t harmed by our neato developer experience.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Astro looks great for performance, accessibility, and for us as developers. So I’m sat at my desk now thinking of what I could build with this thing. It’s dang exciting! Why? There’s a few reasons.</p>
<p>Instead of building a web app with a monolithic JavaScript framework out of the box, Astro encourages you to build a static website like Eleventy and <em>then</em> pull in the best parts of those big frameworks.</p>
<p>Let’s say you want to use a fancy <a href="https://react-hot-toast.com/">React toast component</a> but you don’t want to be bogged down with everything else when it comes to React. Well, with Astro you can do just that. Install the npm package, import the component, and away you go.</p>
<p>I believe you can even mix and match components across frameworks, which is magic. But this is also good for the long run since perhaps your team made a mistake and now wants to introduce components from a different framework. With Astro you can slowly remove those old ones without having to do a complete re-haul of your app.</p>
<p>Another reason to love Astro is the new file format <code>.astro</code>. It’s a heavenly combination of lots of different web technologies. Take a look at <a href="https://github.com/chriscoyier/astro-css-trickzz/blob/master/src/pages/index.astro#L4">this example</a> where Chris fetches data, imports a component, and then builds a whole mini-site with it. Isn’t that file just a pleasure to read? You start with imports at the top, but then you have a style tag for your CSS (where CSS Modules are supported out of the box), then you have the HTML that gets rendered beneath. Simple. Direct. No faffing about. And I’m sure you can have complex <code>.astro</code> components, but that’ll be <em>only when that complexity is necessary</em>.</p>
<p>That last point is the most important thing to me that I missed in the newsletter: all these features sure are nice but there’s a bigger story here about frameworks and our relationship with them.</p>
<p>The modern web wouldn’t be possible without big ol’ JavaScript frameworks, but—<em>but</em>—much of the web today is held back because of these frameworks. There’s a lot of folks out there that think that every website <em>must</em> use their framework of choice even when it’s not necessary. And although those frameworks solve a great number of problems, they introduce a substantial number of trade-offs; performance issues you have to deal with, complex build processes you have to learn, and endless dependency updates that can introduce bugs.</p>
<p>I think of <a href="https://twitter.com/bentlegen/status/1258581839343611905">this tweet by Ben</a> a lot when it comes to the modern web:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In January I spent about 3 hours trying to convert my personal website to<br />
@gatsbyjs.</p>
<p>Then I asked myself “what the hell am I doing”, uploaded an index.html file and called it a day.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And that’s the point I’m getting to with this rant: when you pick a framework today that complexity is overwhelming and, for a lot of cases, pretty dang unnecessary.</p>
<p>The way I’m starting to think about it is this: if React is a giant fortress that can walk around the landscape on enormous mechanical legs, then Astro is a bicycle. Do you need rocket boosters? Add ‘em! Do you need a bedroom on your bicycle? That’s great—go do that. But you have to opt-in to all that complexity.</p>
<p>And that’s why I’m in love with this way of building websites, because software should only be as complex as it needs to be.</p>
<p>No more, no less.</p>
It’s a beautiful day to stay inside2021-06-16T20:51:10Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/it%E2%80%99s-a-beautiful-day-to-stay-inside/<p>I need a new project; something enormous and scary, something to sweep my evenings up and away. Because now, looking back on everything I’ve made over the last decade, I realize just how much these side projects have helped me during tough situations:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://buttondown.email/robinrendle/archive/">Adventures</a> helped put a shape to weekends that would otherwise have left me in despair.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/essays/newsletters">Newsletters</a> helped me repair the damage of intense social isolation during the pandemic. It also gave me an excuse to reach out to people I admire and say “oi!”</li>
<li><a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/essays/the-futures-of-typography">Futures</a> helped me get out of a hospital bed in England and recover from my family tearing itself into a million pieces.</li>
<li><a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/essays/systems-mistakes-and-the-sea">Mistakes</a> helped soothe me during a toxic work relationship that was so awful that I scurried away to LA to have a small breakdown at a friend’s house.</li>
<li>A book project that never worked out helped me get through a summer with no pals in a new city.</li>
</ul>
<p>Those sorts of projects—those that completely consume my time/attention/energy—really are therapy for me. And although this might sound like my life is a train wreck, that’s not really the point I’m trying to make here. It’s just that when things are tough I know I can lean into a side project and it’ll realign my focus and give me something productive to do with so much unstructured time.</p>
<p>I’ve only recently started to see projects as therapy though, because I’m still fighting the overwhelming amount of nonsense that was hammered into my head when I was a kid when it comes to art and work.</p>
<p>Here’s the nonsense: there’s this notion that’s pervasive in our culture that great artistic achievements are really just an act of self harm. Writers, musicians, and artists describe their work in this way all the time; how their pain or sadness—their mythical origin story—is necessary for great work to be done. They fetishize pain and loneliness and sadness to such an extent that the work becomes a way for their pain to be excused, for their self-abuse to be acceptable, just because this one song or painting or joke is <em>perfect</em>.</p>
<p>And so I used to believe that happiness wasn’t productive for making good work. And I hoped beyond hope that my work would outlive me—so I hoped for a sad and isolated life. If only I could write that one immortal sentence or phrase, do some heroic literary deed, that would make the sadness worthwhile but subsequently it would make my entire life worthwhile. So to write that very special thing, I imagined immense pain and loneliness stretched over a vast period of time. I believed that's what made great work, great art. <em>Grit</em>. Waking up at 5am. <em>No friends</em>. No family. No nothing. Type until it hurts and then keep typing because it hurts.</p>
<p>All this nonsense is present everywhere; literature, self-help marketing Tik Toks, blog posts about how to become a good designer. And yet despite it being obvious nonsense, it’s really hard to let go of the idea that your life is worthwhile despite the work. It’s hard to say “if I never write another word again it doesn’t make me a bad person, unworthy of love or respect. I am worthy of love regardless of how much I write/act/paint/blog.” Just typing that out right now—well, boy howdy!—is that a terrible way to structure your life. It sets up this extremely fucked up relationship with your work.</p>
<p>It also sets up a toxic relationship between you and <em>other</em> people’s work, too. Like, damn, Miller really wrote the living shit out of <em>The Song of Achilles</em> and so I despise her now—how <em>dare</em> she write something astronomically good whilst I sit here blogging my life away.</p>
<p>This way of thinking about work is poison and it reduces life to nothing less than a cruel and vindictive competition.</p>
<p>But our work doesn’t have to be like this. It can be this restorative act, this meditative thing that we do each day. The work doesn’t have to be grueling for it to be great. And the work does not have to kill us to make us worthy. We don’t have to treat other people’s work as if it’s a competition, but rather a benefit to our own work because now we can leap frog off of it.</p>
<p>So I tell myself that I can treat my work with as much care as I treat myself. And that I don’t have to sacrifice one for the other. We don’t have to fetishize our grief to make great things. We can be kind and open and happy and the work can still be good.</p>
<p>Or the work doesn’t have to be there at all. And that’s okay, too.</p>
The Secret (and Very Important) History of the U.S. Solar Industry2021-06-16T03:43:39Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-secret-and-very-important-history-of-the-u-s-solar-industry/<p>Robinson Meyer on <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/06/why-the-us-doesnt-really-make-solar-panels-anymore-industrial-policy/619213/">what folks get wrong about technology</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Zoom out a bit, and you can see a deeper problem with how Americans think about technology. We tend, perhaps counterintuitively, to overintellectualize it. Here’s an example: You have probably lived with a leaky faucet in your home at some point, a sink or shower in which you had to get the cold knob just right to actually shut off the flow of water. How did you learn to turn the knob in just the right way—did you find and read a college textbook on Advanced Leaky-Faucet Studies, or did you just fiddle with the knob until you learned how to make it work? If you had to write down instructions for turning the knob so it didn’t leak, would you be able to do it?</p>
<p>[…] R&D is useful, but ultimately only organizations deploying technology at a mass scale can actually advance the technological frontier. We don’t need the government to fund more science alone; we need the government to support a thriving industrial sector and incentivize companies to deploy new technology, as Japan’s government does.</p>
</blockquote>
Old Place, New Place, Reef2021-06-08T14:07:45Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/old-place-new-place-reef/<p>You know those documentaries where you see a tiny octopus on a reef and they’re getting completely annihilated by the crushing waves above and all around? They’ll clutch onto that tiny rock with all their tiny might and won’t ever let go, no matter how much their world rocks from side to side.</p>
<p>Well, that’s how it felt in San Francisco today as the trees crashed into one another and whipped the air up into a frenzy. And the sound! It felt as if the bay had rushed in from both sides of the peninsula—crept towards me in the night—and then bang! This morning a roaring green surf woke up, leaves lapping at the window, pummeling my apartment.</p>
<p>Well, my old apartment.</p>
<p>Now I’m writing this from the top of the park near my old place and I’m watching all these leaves slap together senselessly. Tomorrow I get the keys to my—<em>our</em>—new place and it's just on the other side of this park in the opposite direction over there. And so although I might currently feel like a tiny octupus on a reef as I huddle on this bench and type into my phone whilst the gods throw every gale my way, I’m still smiling.</p>
<p>In the past I’ve only had temporary homes—places where I feel like I’m pitching my tent for a few months or years at a time. My old place feels like that; a temporary shelter from the ravages of the pandemic. It’s a cute place, but I knew I wouldn’t live there long.</p>
<p>But this new place, just over there? I think it's going to be my first home. <em>Our</em> first home, I should say. I just hope it survives the night in these gales. Be gone, wind! Let me cling to my tiny reef in peace.</p>
<p><em>Our</em> reef. Dammit.</p>
Invincible2021-06-05T06:46:55Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/invincible/<p>Okay, so I finally got around to watching <em>Invincible</em>—a new show on Amazon Prime based on a comic book I’d never heard of—and holy shit did it wreck an evening for me the other day.</p>
<p>If you like great shows, go watch it. But if you like great shows that dive into the subject matter of abusive parents and extreme dad stuff then I cannot possibly recommend it more highly.</p>
<p>After the first season concluded I sat up in bed crying for half an hour afterwards, even though the show is mostly about stupid aliens and violent super heroes. Sure, yes, it has a ton of intergalactic monsters and violent flying men in it but that’s just the stuff thrown in to mask the tough question at the center of all the anime nonsense.</p>
<p>I think at the very core of the show, <em>Invincible</em> asks a single question of us: how can we love the people who hurt us the most?</p>
<p>How can we love our parents?</p>
Everything that books ought to be2021-06-05T03:36:36Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/everything-that-books-ought-to-be/<p>I do not hate many things in this world but I will make one exception. Each day I pour all my vitriol and hatred into this thing and hour by hour my hatred increases steadily. So I ask you to please bear with me whilst I throw off this veil of enthusiasm and show you how utterly spiteful I can be at my very worst: hardcover books are the single worst thing in the entire galaxy.</p>
<p>There, I said it.</p>
<p>They're heavy, they’re clunky to hold, the jacket is tacky and sticky and awful. It’s difficult to read the dang things because they require so much energy to wrench open. Not only that but they have sharp edges that dig into my belly when I read in bed and for this punishment I have to pay a mysteriously expensive price because they’re often cheaper than the paperback edition (I'm sure there's some shady market stuff or economics going on there that I don’t know about). And not only all <em>that</em> but then you can <em>only</em> buy the hardcover edition—you must wait months for the soft, painless, no belly-jabbing paperback.</p>
<p>There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. I remember reading the physical edition of <a href="https://prepostbooks.com/physical/artspacetokyo/">Art Space Tokyo</a> a decade ago and coming to the conclusion that I despise Craig Mod for making me not only enjoy a hardcover book but <em>admire</em> it, too. Except this hardcover was different. The edges didn’t prod me. And it didn’t take much effort to crack open. It was as light as a paperback and I never thought once about owning an alternative version instead.</p>
<p>But these types of hardcovers are one-in-a-million. They’re so uncommon that I think most people have never truly held a beautifully made book before. I think in total I own dozens and dozens of books that are well written, funny, and insightful but only 3 or 4 of them are perfectly made <em>Books</em> with a capital B.</p>
<p>In short; never buy a hardcover book.</p>
<p>But can we talk about how much lovelier paperbacks are for a moment? They’re better in every way: lighter, smaller, easier to hold and carry. There’s often no sticky plastic jacket to misplace, and there’s no need to crack it open at the midpoint to read the text. You can fold them up, scrunch them into a ball, and throw them into the depths of your bag without worrying about anything.</p>
<p>Paperbacks are everything that books ought to be.</p>
Be a Big Fan2021-06-05T03:13:22Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/be-a-big-fan/<p>Chris made some notes about turning 40 and <a href="https://chriscoyier.net/2021/06/04/40-for-40/">what he’s learned so far</a>. Of all the great notes and takeaways in here I think the most important one is perhaps this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Be a big fan. Good things will come from your enthusiasm.</p>
</blockquote>
From way out here2021-05-22T17:57:40Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-first-normal-day/<p>Yesterday the sky was so very blue. It was the sort of day that’s impossible in England, a country where the blue is rare and on the occasion it does appear, it’s now faded somewhat to my eye. But just when I thought the color yesterday could not possibly improve here, that’s when a prolonged evening of dazzling colors crashed into one another and made a glorious mess everywhere. Evenings like this are yellowy-gold-explosion-blankets of color. A great fire-storm of orange and purples and yellows.</p>
<p>I mention the color of the sky because yesterday was the first normal day in a very long time. It was the sort of day where we could sit in a place with strangers and just think about the color of the sky without the looming threat of a virus upon us. Here we are so very lucky, so very privileged, I thought, to enjoy the color of this blue. To chat about future plans. To hug this funny weirdo I just met.</p>
<p>Before the colors exploded in the sky, we headed out across the bridge and over to Bernal to look at an apartment and the moment we stepped inside I knew it would make a beautiful home for us; striking white walls, enormous windows all over the place, and out there the whole time was that striking blue sky. It felt so very normal, so very <em>obvious</em> to me that we might live in a place like this.</p>
<p>As the realtor asked us questions I zoned out for a bit, thinking about what fun we’d have in this long hallway, what fun we’d have in the living room giggling about tomato frogs or baked beans. I thought about us here in this room; Celine playing a puzzle game in bed whilst I read a book or perhaps I’d still be ranting incoherently about how awful the ending of Castlevania was. “Oh this vampire dude was...Death? And Dracula’s charming wife was totally okay about her husband becoming a genocidal maniac? All is forgiven? Extremely cool!” I’d shout in an extremely un-cool way whilst Celine click-clacks houses and rivers and foxes together, soft piano music drifting along the corridor all the while.</p>
<p>The daydream stopped though when I entered one of the rooms. It was a special room. “Now here,” I whispered menacingly and looking out the window, "here I could write something beautiful.” Buckets of coffee and diet coke would be drunk at this desk and ten million blog posts would be typed out in a complete random fashion. Oh the furious blogging I could do this in room!</p>
<p>After the daydreams, we went to Roxie’s in the Inner Sunset for some British chocolates. I picked up Marmite and crouched for a picture with some baked beans as if I were praying to them.</p>
<p>We traveled back across the bridge to a beer garden in Berkeley. A BART line was suspended above—god how I’ve missed the sound of trains—and one of them zipped over us and rattled across the beer garden, making a lovely racket as it did. It all felt more like Berlin or Amsterdam than it did the Bay Area. And this trip into Berkeley had me thinking...perhaps I’d ignored it until now as a possibility; Berkeley has always been a place annoyingly far away, perhaps always a little too sleepy for my liking. But now I could see myself biking up and down these streets from one cafe to the next. I could see us renting a place on a quiet corner somewhere.</p>
<p>As we drove back home I spotted San Francisco on the horizon, across the water, and it showed me something new. From this distance SF looks like a towering utopia, a place of pure science fiction. It looked like the place you’d see in establishing shots in Star Trek and now I could see the appeal of why people live here. It’s the perfect distance to enjoy San Francisco because you can sit back and admire the city without having to live with all the limitations and foibles and structural terribleness of the real thing.</p>
<p>From way out here you could dream of San Francisco and dream it into something else, something better.</p>
Animal Crossing2021-05-20T18:10:06Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/animal-crossing/<p>This album by Emily Hopkins called <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/2spgyI2HpNL4Mwp02ghoVa?si=pDEiBhUyS8qk9Qgn3C5RHg">Animal Crossing</a> is a pure delight. If you like farming games or if you’d like to feel like you’re farming whilst you work then this is the absolute perfect album for you.</p>
Marvel Superhero Lettering2021-05-20T15:50:08Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/marvel-superhero-lettering/<p>Somehow I had missed this excellent blog post from Reagan Ray about <a href="https://reaganray.com/2021/04/06/marvel-lettering.html">the lettering in Marvel comics</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...like most lettering, right around the late 90s, it all went to shit. The hand-lettering masterpieces were abandoned for fonts and photoshop effects. With that said, I limited this post to the pre-'00s. I wanted to do something more vintage, but there are just too many from the 80s and 90s that I love. My absolute favorite was seeing all the interpretations of 3D type.</p>
</blockquote>
The Cage2021-05-18T18:14:10Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-cage/<p>A few weeks ago <a href="https://twitter.com/robinrendle/status/1388942982225666051">I ranted</a> about RSS again:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One of the neat things about RSS I’ve noticed is the number of times I walk away from it feeling awe instead of anger (basically 100% of the time). I think that’s because there’s no money in it, there’s no incentive to profit off my rage.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The reason why I said that is because I often feel as if Twitter or YouTube or basically any service that provides recommendations is <a href="https://twitter.com/robinrendle/status/1388944569555771398">trying to make me feel a certain way</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Who is trying to make me angry” and “is this anger useful” are two really good questions I ask myself on this website.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is because on the web, rage is more profitable than porn. And I find myself running away from services that manipulate me in this way because they're just designed to make me angry or jealous. And I can feel myself age exponentially as I doom scroll these sorts of websites.</p>
<p>On this note, Jeremy wrote about how there's <a href="https://adactio.com/journal/18117">no way to escape</a> these recommendation systems because we don't know how they watch us as we surf the web. Each click, swipe, and hover sends data somewhere that is then processed in ways that are sort of designed to hurt us:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...what a lack of imagination to look at an existing broken system—that doesn’t even provide good recommendations while making people afraid to click on links—and shrug and say that this is the best we can do. If this really is “the best way to navigate a world of infinite choice” then it’s no wonder that people feel like they need to go on a digital detox and get away from their devices in order to feel normal. It’s like saying that decapitation is the best way of solving headaches.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I felt like that last week. I realized that I couldn't escape the cage: every platform was recommending me something, guiding my life down a path I felt like I couldn’t control. The music I listen to, the videos I watch, the words I see. Everything is guided by this invisible hand.</p>
<p>This is why RSS is the promised land. And, subsequently, this is why I adore <a href="https://letterboxd.com/">Letterboxd</a>. Sure, you can see which movies are popular that week. But all the recommendations are surfaced by movies your friends love. It feels like Twitter in the early days, when a small band of extremely smart people linked to things and said “holy smokes, I love this thing.”</p>
Power and the workplace2021-05-13T16:54:09Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/power-and-the-workplace/<p>Ethan Marcotte wrote about <a href="https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/union/">why tech workers should unionize</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Basecamp story’s been a difficult one for me to follow. It’s a story about employees volunteering time to improve their workplace; it’s a story about racism and white supremacy in that workplace; it’s a story about company leaders mishandling a delicate situation, and to such an extent that a third of their employees left en masse.</p>
<p>I’d like to suggest it’s also a story about power.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Mandy Brown followed these notes to their next logical conclusion in <a href="https://buttondown.email/aworkinglibrary/archive/office-politics-a-working-letter/">her excellent newsletter</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When we talk about politics belonging outside the workplace, we reduce democracy to an extracurricular instead of a core part of our lives. Democracy cannot be sustained by annual visits to the ballot box—it isn’t something we have, it’s something we practice.</p>
</blockquote>
The Return of the Blogroll2021-05-09T17:10:58Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-return-of-the-blogroll/<p>New design day! Well, really it’s more of a typographic facelift with a few improvements to the homepage, but still.</p>
<p>Why have I redesigned this here website? I guess for a while now I’ve felt that I want to push back against the grain of the web a tiny bit: most websites reduce and reduce and reduce until there’s nothing but a single sentence on the page. And...that can be good! Brevity is the soul of something or other, but now it feels like most personal websites are simply calling cards.</p>
<p>With this new design I want to challenge myself to more than just a single sentence or a single column per page. What if, instead, I showed you who I really am? A clunky, somewhat disorganized thinker with sticky notes all over the place. Blogrolls and folks I admire! Random font appreciation! The latest notes that have been rattling around in my head!</p>
<p>I also went in this direction because one thing I miss about ye olde web is that feeling of falling into—and through—a blog. There was so much stuff on a page back then you felt like you could really get caught up in the life of someone. Sure, you wouldn’t knowing where to begin. There’s hyperlinks all over the place and weird projects over there and threads about random things over there.</p>
<p>It was like stumbling into someone's office and rummaging about in their desk. You could see more clearly who someone was, despite the lack of focus and that single perfect sentence/elevator-pitch that welcomes you on every website today.</p>
<p>So, welcome to whatever this is. Let’s see how it goes.</p>
Is CSS a Programming Language?2021-05-07T23:23:40Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/is-css-a-programming-language/<p>I love this post from Chris where he asks if <a href="https://css-tricks.com/is-css-a-programming-language/">CSS is a programming language</a> and confronts it in a way I’ve always felt quietly but never put into words:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I have a real distaste for this question. It might seem like a fun question to dig into on the surface, but the way it enters public discourse rarely seems to be in good faith. There are ulterior motives at play involving respect, protective emotions, and desires to break or maintain the status quo.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And I am legally bound to quote this part, too:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>OK fine, CSS is essentially Turing complete, but it just doesn’t feel like CSS (or HTML for that matter) is a programming language to you. It’s too declarative. Too application-specific. Whatever it is, I honestly don’t blame you. What I hope is that whatever conclusion you come to, the answer doesn’t affect things that really matter, like pay and respect.</p>
<p>Respect is in order, no matter what any of us come to for an answer.</p>
</blockquote>
Sentry Alerts2021-05-07T15:43:45Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/alert/<p>When you’re building an app you often want to know two things: why are things slow and what’s on fire? Or: how miserable are my users and where is that pain felt the most? That’s why we just shipped a host of improvements that should help you answer those types of questions.</p>
<p>It also happens to be my first big project at Sentry: a sweeping update to alerts.</p>
<p>With Sentry you can set up an alert to monitor <a href="https://katydecorah.com/code/monitor-404s-with-sentry/">when your users see 404 pages</a> or we can alert you when your app has too many errors. We can also alert you when performance is bad, for example when <a href="https://twitter.com/bentlegen/status/1390376607756468226?s=20">a Core Web Vital is too dang slow</a>. There’s a host of other things we can alert you about too which is why we now show you a handy list of examples when you’re creating an alert:</p>
<figure class="m-wrapper--full">
<img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/cleanshot-2021-05-07-at-08.56.56.png" alt="The Sentry app showing all of the alerts you can now create" />
</figure>
<p>Once you’ve set up an alert you can head on over to the Alerts page where you’ll see a list of the alert rules you’ve created and their status. Is everything green? Neato, you don’t have to worry about anything (yet).</p>
<p>But if an alert rule detects a problem then it’ll float to the top of the list and tell you precisely what’s on fire and how bad that fire is:</p>
<figure class="m-wrapper--full">
<img alt="The Alerts page in Sentry where you can see the status of your alert rules" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/alerts-homepage.png" />
</figure>
<p>Okay, neat. So let’s say you have an alert that’s shouting at you about the <a href="https://web.dev/lcp/">Largest Contentful Paint</a> on the Checkout page. Dang, I thought we fixed that! Well, not to worry. If you click on that alert you’ll now find a page that explains what’s happening in more detail and it’ll show you some hints as to what the solution might be. You can also zoom in and zoom out to see how many alerts were triggered by that rule over the past 7 days, giving a better idea of patterns instead of a specific problem:</p>
<figure class="m-wrapper--full">
<img alt="The alerts detail page" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/alert-details-page.png" />
</figure>
<p>You’ll see which transactions were slow or which issues have happened in that period of time so you can see the impact of the problem and information about how to go about fixing it.</p>
<p>We’re pretty dang happy with how this project turned out but your scalding, uncompromisingly brutal feedback is always very welcome. Also compliments. I love those, too.</p>
Anti-SEO2021-05-05T21:04:56Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/anti-seo/<p>I love it when blog post titles are indecipherable to search engines. There are exceptions, like when you want to document a technical thing and so you should have a blog post title describe that but the majority of the time I feel like blog post titles should sound like the chapters of a book: cool and not entirely obvious what they’re about.</p>
<p>There’s something so dang refreshing about making something for the sake of the thing, rather than for the random praise of a search engine deity.</p>
Mercure2021-05-05T14:58:42Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/mercure/<p><a href="https://www.abyme.net/catalogue/mercure/">Mercure</a> looks bloody lovely. Not entirely sure what it is that I like about it, besides it’s obvious elegance and quietness. I adore the capital, Trojan-esque characters and the <em>shhhh</em>-ness of the text when in long, bookish columns.</p>
<p>I had never heard of the type foundry <a href="https://www.abyme.net/">Abyme</a> before, nor had I seen their Tumblr-like website with random images and typeset chunks that float all over the place. This reminds me that at this point in the life of the web, any website that doesn’t start with a single sentence at the top of the page feels <em>cool</em> to me. Like, when I have to really <em>stare</em> at a website to understand what it wants me to do, how it wants me to read it—that’s just so thrilling.</p>
<p>That cool-mystery-website feeling is extremely rare. And I was reminded this the other day when I stumbled upon Ftrain’s <a href="https://ftrain.com/TablesOfContents">Ways of Reading</a>. I was shocked that a website could restructure and retrofit multiple tables of contents to suit multiple ways of reading — but of course you can!</p>
<p>It’s a reminder for me that there’s not just one way to make a website. And it takes a degree of stubbornness that I admire to find something entirely new.</p>
What the Redesign2021-05-02T18:14:57Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/what-the-redesign/<p>I’m redesigning the homepage right now (it’s so dang hard introducing yourself on the web!) and I’m bumping into tons of weird, old decisions I made whilst writing the CSS maybe four or five years ago. I try hard not to rewrite things from scratch when it comes to my personal site but the styles are starting to creak and moan under the weight of so many tiny bug fixes and what-if-I-just-change-this-one-thing moments.</p>
<p>It’s getting to the point where burning it all to the ground and starting again would be <em>so much faster</em> than just continuing to type over it all.</p>
<p>For example: what the heck is this <code>.m-longform</code> CSS class? Why did I think that wrapping every typographic element in that was a sensible thing to do? Why are all the font-sizes way, way too big? Why did I use all these link mixins for Sass and why did I add all these spacing utility classes when I don’t really need them? Why did I tie all these design components together in such a dependent way?</p>
<p>It’s easy to hate your old work but all of these things were attempts to fix one problem or another. And it’s important to remember that every system, given enough time, becomes bloated and unwieldy. It’s impossible to build a website without tech debt, or without problems. But now I’m thinking about longer term solutions to these issues I’m bumping into.</p>
<p>Would variable fonts, adaptive typography, container queries fix this? Are these problems technology based? Or is it a problem with the way that I approached my work in the past?</p>
<p>In short: how do I prevent future problems? And how do I avoid redesigns of the system five years from today?</p>
One of those photographs2021-04-29T16:14:33Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/one-of-those-photographs-1/<p>A few months ago I couldn't stop looking at a photograph. It was taken at Fort Riley in Kansas around 1918 and shows an enormous, cavernous room stacked full of patients lying on beds; soldiers stricken with the Spanish Flu. Hats, masks, no phones. Doctors and nurses make their rounds.</p>
<p>In the center of the photograph, a man younger than me is holding a letter and, at just the right moment, he looks at the camera.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/2560px-emergency_hospital_during_influenza_epidemic-_camp_funston-_kansas_-_ncp_1603.jpeg" alt="A photograph taken around 1918 of soldiers lying in beds during the Spanish Flu" /></p>
<p>I got the first shot of the Pfizer vaccine today. Celine dropped me off at the Oakland Convention Center — an enormous, cavernous room setup for vaccinations. And as soon as I walked in I thought of that photograph. Imagine the <em>scale</em> of this machine, all over the country there are rooms like this.</p>
<p>Except, well, as a Brit there's something odd, something evil in fact, about getting a vaccination from a company (in my case, Kaiser Permanente). I'm incredibly lucky to have health insurance but standing in that room made my blood boil. You see, getting a vaccine from Kaiser is like getting a vaccine from Coca Cola or McDonald's. Why the fuck is a company giving out the vaccine?</p>
<p>As I’m in line, standing there teary-eyed from the downright majesty of the moment but also standing there with a clenched fist from the absolute evil of commercialized medicine, someone behind me calls out to a nurse. “Excuse me," she said “is this vaccine free?”</p>
<p>“Of course,” she replied. Of course.</p>
<p>I’m outside waiting for Celine to pick me up now and I can’t stop thinking of that photograph over and over again. I was in one of those photographs just a moment ago. That was me.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/d7948191-77d5-4fc7-aa48-c63e3b075325_1_105_c-1.jpg" alt="A picture of me with the vaccine sticker" /></p>
Don’t think like a database2021-04-27T16:37:53Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/don%E2%80%99t-think-like-a-database/<p>This is something I have to keep reminding myself when it comes to design: don't think like a database.</p>
<p>If the data or the back-end requires you to do something, it doesn't mean that's how users should think about a problem. It's a common mistake in UI design: revealing the database in a form or the navigation. But complexity on the back-end doesn't mean you should show that complexity on the front-end.</p>
<p>My team at Sentry just released a ton of updates which I'll write about this month and our goal with the design was to ignore that complexity entirely and focus on what the user needs to accomplish. It's hard doing that though because first you have to understand the back-end. <em>Then</em> you have to unlearn it.</p>
<p>Designers must hide the enormously complex machine that's spinning away on servers somewhere out there. And I'm still not good at it, I make a ton of mistakes all the time, but I think it's an important note to remember next time.</p>
<p>When it comes to design: forget the database, pretend it isn’t there.</p>
Everyone in the world is just an email away2021-04-21T15:38:15Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/everyone-in-the-world-is-just-an-email-away/<p>I wrote an email to Lucy over the weekend all about, well, <a href="https://world.hey.com/robin.rendle/everyone-in-the-world-is-just-an-email-away-a1eff400">email and the web</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Anyway, I see HTML and CSS as a bridge—a set of languages and agreements between browsers that give us access to nigh-on everyone in the world. (And I think that’s a neat way to see publishing in general, actually. Publish a thing and suddenly you have access to more ideas and weirder friends, rather than just simply acquiring a handful of retweets and a bunch of $).</p>
<p>Anyway anyway, I’m typing at you now from my inbox which is then being published as a blog post via Hey World—once I hit send it’ll be catapulted out into the ether for everyone to read. Isn’t that exciting? Even our inboxes are publishing platforms now. And sure, Hey is a commercial product, but what this suggests to me is that we haven’t even come close to figuring out the web yet.</p>
</blockquote>
Puffin and Puffin Arcade2021-04-19T23:28:17Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/puffin-and-puffin-arcade/<p>Here’s some nifty new fonts from Bold Monday: <a href="https://boldmonday.com/typeface/puffin/">Puffin</a> and <a href="https://www.boldmonday.com/typefaces/puffin-arcade/">Puffin Arcade</a>, designed by Pieter van Rosmalen. I particularly like the Arcade variant since it’s not often that a font elicits a loud <em>oooooo!</em> when I see it for the first time.</p>
<p>Puffin Arcade is a bitmap font with variants like those found in <a href="https://readonlymemory.vg/shop/book/arcade-game-typography/">classic arcade games</a>; Dither, Nerf, Liquid, Warp, Wipe, Yoko, Tate, Level, and Foozle.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/8000x1234.puffinarcade_inuse_10.png" alt="An example of the Puffin Arcade font" /></p>
How To Be Hopeless2021-04-15T04:33:39Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/how-to-be-hopeless/<p>“Dealing with fascism is an inevitable part of living alongside other people,” Carlos Maza argues in this excellent video called <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJaE_BvLK6U">How To Be Hopeless</a>.</p>
<p>Maza compares fascism to a plague:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This is what it means to fight a plague: it's rage, exhaustion, and more often than not, it's mourning. Not just for the way things are, but all the ways things could've been.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This video broke me this morning. It puts words to something that I’ve tried to over and over again. Carlos has me thinking about <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/potential-and-loss">potential and loss</a> again. But...also regret.</p>
<p>My greatest regret is that I didn’t fight Brexit. I didn't go to any protests. I didn't help at all. Heck, I didn't even vote against it. I was so thoroughly consumed with my own ego that I believed something so utterly batshit could never happen.</p>
<p>And so I chose to ignore the plague.</p>
<p>But then I watched it roll into my hometown and by then it was too late. My family was consumed whole by racist propaganda; my mom, my dad, my brother. Fascist ideology took hold of their minds until today I barely recognize them.</p>
<p>For years I would call my family. I would pace around my apartment in the middle of the night whilst screaming and wailing and pleading with them. I read everything I could about Brexit and tried to figure out which arguments worked best. Nothing worked.</p>
<p>It seemed so futile, like a virus without a cure. Yet I believed I could purge these fascist sympathies from my family through sheer force of will. Through sheer stubbornness. And love.</p>
<p>Since then I keep coming back to this piece by Dorothy Thompson from 1941 called <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/">Who Goes Nazi?</a> She wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.</p>
<p>[...] It’s fun—a macabre sort of fun—this parlor game of “Who Goes Nazi?” And it simplifies things—asking the question in regard to specific personalities.</p>
<p>Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi.[...] But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dorothy is describing the same plague, and 71 years later we’re still fighting this thing. In Carlos’s video he makes a startling argument: we’ll <em>always</em> be fighting this plague, fascism isn’t something that ever goes away. The problems within our society are buried so deep that it’s impossible to ever fully uproot this thing. But that doesn’t mean we should give up.</p>
<p>How do we fight it? Carlos quotes Albert Camus with perhaps the only good answer we have:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The only means of fighting a plague is common decency.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I don’t find much solace in this, but I do like it. It reminds me of <em>Invisible Cities</em> where Italo Calvino describes how we must fight the inferno:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And then hold on tight.</p>
Monitor 404s with Sentry2021-04-13T15:49:19Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/monitor-404s-with-sentry/<p>Katy wrote about <a href="https://katydecorah.com/code/monitor-404s-with-sentry/">how to detect 404s with Sentry</a>: her team set up an alert to shout at them when more than 10 users see the same 404 path in a week. That's pretty neat! Katy writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Since introducing Sentry to our 404 page, nearly two years ago, we have caught issues before users and our team members. But, more importantly, no false alarms.</p>
</blockquote>
world@hey.com2021-04-12T02:31:01Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/world-hey-com/<p>I loved <a href="https://overcast.fm/+JptjDjl1o">this episode</a> of the Rework podcast about the release of <a href="https://hey.com/world/">HEY World</a>. Here’s how it works: once you've signed up for a HEY email account you can then send an email to <a href="mailto:world@hey.com">world@hey.com</a>. Your message will become a webpage (like a blog post) which people can then sign up to and receive notifications via RSS or email (like a newsletter).</p>
<p>Spoilers: I love this idea.</p>
<p>Besides how neat that is (tying blogging to your email address) there's this other remarkable thing about how this is built: There's no JavaScript! No ads! No analytics! No cookies! Each post on HEY World is devoid of popups, too. And it's simply bonkers to me that this feels like a new kind of software; a fresh and exciting website with no junk.</p>
<p>This is probably the biggest indictment of modern web design...when you take the web back to 1.0 and it feels <em>new</em> again.</p>
Fonts in Focus: Louche2021-04-11T01:20:39Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/fonts-in-focus-louche/<p>Louche is a striking typeface and <a href="https://ilovetypography.com/2021/04/03/fonts-in-focus-louche/">John Boardley has the scoop</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In 2019, Joona graduated from the Royal Academy of Art in Den Haag with a Masters in Type Design. It was during the course that the idea for Louche was born. Joona wondered how a typeface might feel like an italic while remaining upright in stance. At first glance, Louche (pronounced Loosh) appears to be an idiosyncratic and condensed high-contrast display typeface. Upon closer inspection, it still is! But it’s also much more — in both its conception and execution.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Look at that ampersand! And the lowercase e, n, and g! These shapes have such high contrast (extremely thick and thin strokes) that it even looks gothic in some parts, like the lowercase y.</p>
<p>I think I'm going to go buy this from <a href="https://www.futurefonts.xyz/joona-louhi/louche">Future Fonts</a>. It's too weird not to.</p>
Neglect and the Shepard-Risset glissando2021-04-09T07:05:50Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/neglect-and-the-shepard-risset-glissando/<p>I’m obsessed with work. It’s the first thing I wake up with in the morning and it’s the last thing I think of before I fall asleep. Well, “sleep” wouldn’t be fair because it’s a shattered, partial, broken half-trance that I slip into these days. Throughout the night I’ll wake up with my jaw clamped down as if a wire has been pulled taut in my body and my back will scream as if a violin string is being pulled through me.</p>
<p>Something’s...wrong. But it’s impossible to say what.</p>
<p>It’s like my body is ringing all the alarm bells but there’s no reason to feel this way. No one is telling me I’m doing a bad job, no one is telling me I should be feeling this immense bout of guilt and shame. But it doesn’t matter, because I feel like I’m constantly half-assing everything and I’m letting everyone down.</p>
<p>(Heck, this week I’m Smashing Magazine’s <a href="https://twitter.com/smashingmag/status/1379365707025149953?s=20">person of the week</a> which is very kind and generous of them, but the very first thought I had when I saw was “wow, I’m doing a terrible job. If only I did something worthy of all this.”)</p>
<p>The quality of my work and my writing has been slipping for the past couple of weeks—yes, and that’s okay—but my body’s response is disproportionate to the scale of the problem. I’m going to have a few off days/weeks and yet my body is responding as if it’s an utter calamity. Yet nothing horrible is happening to me, I’m just not proud of the work I’m doing...and that’s somehow leading to this feeling of imminent doom and disaster? What gives? Why do I feel this way?</p>
<p>This wouldn’t be so bad if these feelings only impacted my work. But I notice that when this happens then the rest of my life falls by the way side. It’s pure neglect; I notice less of the world around me, I stop calling friends and caring about my diet, I begin to write less and my apartment becomes an embarrassing mess. The world around me gets smaller, it tightens up in moments like these until there are fewer jokes to make and giggles to be had, there are fewer brilliant books to read and there is much less playful, excitable typing to be done.</p>
<p>And I’m not sure what to do.</p>
Okay, sue me!2021-04-08T22:59:06Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/okay-sue-me/<p>So I was wrong about <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/here-i-am-king">that piece by Jason Farago</a> — it's definitely not inspired by <em>Newsletters</em> at all. Just a quick search for his other pieces show one from <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/25/arts/benjamin-west-general-wolfe.html">November 2020</a> and earlier. So I'm not an inspiration, huh?</p>
<p>Outrageous!</p>
<p>Jokin’ aside, it's neat that we came to the same conclusion though. I've never seen this work before and yet somehow we both came to this format separately. Maybe there's some work that links us, that binds us together, some old website with a format adjacent to this scrolly-panel business. Perhaps we read the same comics and the same novels and independently arrived at <em>incredibly</em> similar ideas through that.</p>
<p>There's something oddly comforting to me about this because damn I absolutely love reading in this way. It forces you to slow down and not just skim through the piece like any old article. You have to hold your breath. <em>Slowly</em>. Sentence by sentence.</p>
The Art of Typewriting2021-04-08T22:43:36Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-art-of-typewriting/<p><a href="https://vol.co/product/the-art-of-typewriting/">Fuck</a></p>
Here, I am king2021-04-08T13:35:03Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/here-i-am-king/<p>This is a shockingly beautiful thing by Jason Farago about <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/04/02/arts/design/shah-jahan-chitarman.html">art and power</a>. Everything about this piece is a delight: the design of the site, the looking-closely-until-it-hurts, the pace and momentum of the writing.</p>
<p>Jason writes about art in the time of Shah Jahan, the 17th century Mughal emperor (that's the chap that commissioned the Taj Mahal), and zooms into one painting of him in particular. This makes for my favorite writing; <a href="https://buttondown.email/robinrendle/archive/8907d5a1-bc42-4a51-a1fb-19e0af6f40ec">pointing at things and falling in love</a>.</p>
<p>But the ending of this piece is what slapped me awake:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...if you want to last forever, make something beautiful.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I know this is bonkers but I can't help but wonder if this piece is somewhat inspired by <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/essays/newsletters">Newsletters</a> though—the snapping of new chunks of text into view, the beginning of sentences with "...", the pace of it—it all reminds me of...me?</p>
<p>Perhaps that's an absolutely bonkers thing to say out loud, but it would be super neat if this beautiful thing was inspired by something I made. And if not, then it's equally neat that we kind of made something similar by happenstance.</p>
All I Want2021-04-08T13:15:40Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/all-i-want/<p>Lucy wrote a great piece about <a href="https://lucybellwood.com/all-i-want/">the good days</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>On the good days, everything feels connected—a giant wall of conspiracy string. But on the bad days, every gesture and thought sits in isolation. It’s like I’m looking at the same board, but someone has turned off the layer containing the string. Rather than an electric galaxy of potential I just see…a mess. Disorganized, aimless, futile.</p>
</blockquote>
The Loves of Achilles2021-04-07T06:18:09Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-loves-of-achilles/<p>Alberto Manguel in <em>The Library at Night</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One of the lost plays of Sophocles is <em>The Loves of Achilles</em>, copies of which must have perished one after another, century after century, destroyed in pillaging and fires or excluded from library catalogues because perhaps the librarian deemed the play of little interest or of poor literary quality. A few words were, however, miraculously preserved. "In the Dark Ages, in Macedonia," Tom Stoppard has one of his characters explain in his play <em>The Invention of Love</em>, "in the last guttering light from classical antiquity, a man copied out bits from old books for his young son, whose name was Septimius; so we have one sentence from <em>The Loves of Achilles</em>. Love, said Sophocles, feels like the ice held in the hand by children."</p>
</blockquote>
Patterned2021-04-04T07:30:13Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/patterned/<p><a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/patterned/id1451427298">Patterned</a> is great. It's an iOS light puzzle game with soft piano in the background which makes it the perfect thing to play in bed. I've watched Celine play it the last few nights and it's so dang soothing.</p>
<p>(This is an endorsement of the game part of this app though and not the typography because it is very Lobster-inspired and dang that's not something that matches the tone or feel of the game parts at all.)</p>
Style Check2021-04-03T18:54:18Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/style-check/<p>I’m late to the party here but this week I discovered that iA Writer has a feature they call <a href="https://ia.net/writer/blog/introducing-style-check">Style Check</a> which suggests superfluous words to remove:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s not like any of the existing grammar checkers or functions. There is no AI, it is not smarter than you, and it doesn’t steal your texts. It makes you think about what you say. And yet it can improve your writing instantaneously.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’ve used it over the past few days and it’s just the sort of nudge I need to remove words that don’t <em>really</em> need to stick around. But this also reminds me of Chris’s notes on <a href="https://css-tricks.com/words-avoid-educational-writing/">words to avoid</a> when it comes to educational writing.</p>
How Not to Write a Book2021-03-31T15:53:43Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/how-not-to-write-a-book/<p>Okay, hear me out: what if I wrote a book in public? And—what if—I wrote about the process of writing/designing/building it each week in a newsletter. I’d have no idea where I was going with it, or what the book could possibly be, and we’d all figure it out in public together. It would be the equivalent of a CSS-Tricks blog post except instead of learning how a website works under the hood, I’d write about all the complexities of writing and making a physical book.</p>
<p>Working title? <em>How Not to Write a Book</em>.</p>
<p>In the first edition I could tease out the subject, in the next I could plan out the chapters, in another I could bemoan the difficulty of writing something at this scale, the next after that I could interview book designers and writers that have made similar things. In another edition of this series I could brood about a book that I dislike for this one petty reason (it’s always the margins) or I could think through the design, walk through the troubles of InDesign or the web. I could write about the format of this proto-book, write about the history of graphic design in this field. Paper stock, color theory, typesetting, editing; the list is endless.</p>
<p>Would this be a paper object or another website? I have no idea. This project might spit out a novel, a Kindle book, a series of videos, a picture book...</p>
<p>It would be thrilling to figure all that out.</p>
<p>Multiple books might come out of this project or even no book at all. Maybe this series of newsletters/blog posts(?) would be a warning for future writers: do not write like this in public, beware this coastal route, because there lie dangers ahead.</p>
<p>And yet, perhaps something else—a book—might emerge.</p>
The incredible boxes of Hock Wah Yeo2021-03-30T19:30:12Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-incredible-boxes-of-hock-wah-yeo/<p>A fabulous piece about the videogame box design of Hock Wah Yeo. <a href="https://obscuritory.com/essay/incredible-boxes-of-hock-wah-yeo/">Phil Salvador writes</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When Yeo was making packaging for a game, the way he thought about it, he was giving the game a physical form. Software is “intangible,” he explained, and when you’re designing a box, it’s a opportunity to give the game a physical shape, to take a digital idea and turn it into a real, three-dimensional object.</p>
<p>[...] That was the core of Yeo’s design philosophy: getting people to pick up the box. “If you want to sell somebody something,” he said, “it’s gotta be in your hands.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I had never seen <em>The Prince of Persia</em> box before but dang is it an absolute beauty.</p>
The Amazing Solution for Almost Nothing2021-03-28T17:05:49Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-amazing-solution-for-almost-nothing/<p><a href="https://thecorrespondent.com/655/blockchain-the-amazing-solution-for-almost-nothing/86649455475-f933fe63">Jesse Frederik</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who thought: but what is it then, for God’s sake, this whole blockchain thing? And what’s so terribly revolutionary about it? What problem does it solve?</p>
<p>That’s why I wrote this article. I can tell you upfront, it’s a bizarre journey to nowhere. I’ve never seen so much incomprehensible jargon to describe so little. I’ve never seen so much bloated bombast fall so flat on closer inspection. And I’ve never seen so many people searching so hard for a problem to go with their solution.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Jesse hits the nail on the head later in the piece:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This is the market for magic, and that market is big.</p>
</blockquote>
A Year Without Books2021-03-27T03:09:40Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/a-year-without-books-1/<p>I haven’t read a book all year. During the course of the pandemic I haven’t been able to focus enough to get through anything longer than a blog post or a newsletter. Typically I’ll start reading something, the novelty will wear off, and then I’ll have no interest in pushing forwards. It’s like I can’t hold all the pieces of the story in my mind right now — the plot either gallops off leaving me behind or it’ll freeze in its step and I suddenly find myself begging to speed things up.</p>
<p>And yet, and yet.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/unknown-1.webp" alt="A picture of me holding the novel Circe" /></p>
<p>Madeline Miller’s novel <em>Circe</em> is a revelation. I picked it up a week ago and before I knew it I had let it consume every moment of my time. It was like stumbling upon a TV show that <em>gets</em> you and is impossible to describe why it’s so important to anyone else; it was mysterious and thrilling and un-put-downable.</p>
<p>And it was, as all stories should dare, entirely novel.</p>
<p>Miller writes from the perspective of Circe, the daughter of the sun god Helios, and I only knew vaguely about her; I remembered her name, and that she was one of the gods that Odysseus was stranded with on his way back from the Trojan wars in <em>The Odyssey</em>. Beyond that I knew nothing about her story. But now Circe is my favorite of the gods.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most impressive thing about this story though is the way that Miller sets up a universe with specific rules. Yes, there are spells and magics and gods that can snap their fingers and realign the stars in an instant—but!—it all works. The rules make sense.</p>
<p>Most magical worlds fall flat in this way for me. Take the Snyder cut of the <em>Justice League</em> for example: in a flashback they cut to Zeus and I started laughing hilariously because it’s a man dressed like <em>fucking Zeus</em> and he seems so out of place in a world with a dude called Batman in it. His magic seems...incorrect and out of balance with the world. In <em>Circe</em> however, all the magic is in perfect balance. Even Zeus himself becomes this terrifying and permanent force throughout the novel despite you never seeing him. His power is overwhelming and deadly even to other gods.</p>
<p>Anyway, I know I’m rambling incoherently here but <em>Circe</em> is such an important story to me because Miller took all these mythologies that are thousands of years old and wove them into something new. It’s like all the stars aligned in my garden at just the right time to drop this thing in my lap because throughout the novel Circe must confront her immortality; she watches the people she loves age and die around her. And during the pandemic I’ve felt precisely like Circe—trapped up inside my apartment I feel like an immortal god where the world is spinning around me uncontrollably and from very far away I’m watching everyone hold onto their lives, gasping for every last breath.</p>
<p>Circe confronts her survivor’s guilt within these pages and yet what makes her a hero to me is that despite that doom bearing down on her shoulders—a world impossible to overcome—she fights until the very end.</p>
<p>Miller writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life's precariousness, its thready breath. Beside me, my husband's pulse beats at his throat; in their beds, my children's skin shows every faintest scratch. A breeze would blow them over, and the world is filled with more than breezes: diseases and disasters, monsters and pain in a thousand variations. I do not forget either my father and his kind hanging over us, bright and sharp as swords, aimed at our tearing flesh. If they do not fall on us in spite and malice, then they will fall by accident or whim. My breath fights in my throat. How can I live on beneath such a burden of doom? I rise then and go to my herbs. I create something, I transform something...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So Circe has taught me that in moments like these we must do something brave: we must go to our herbs.</p>
Every website is a gift2021-03-23T04:19:34Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/every-website-is-a-gift/<p>“Let a website be a worry stone,” <a href="https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/let-a-website-be-a-worry-stone/">Ethan wrote last year</a> and I believe that’s so very true. We can treat our personal sites like stress balls and use all that pent up anxiety about the state of the world; we can tidy up the fonts, improve the Lighthouse score, tweak the colors, or edit the copy of an old blog post just because it helps.</p>
<p>I’ve spent many an anxious weekend doing just that. Every time the fonts on here change it’s because I’ve been worried about something and I just need to direct my focus into this one, tiny little detail to smoothe things over.</p>
<p>And so over the years I’ve found that my website is a worry stone, yes. But at the beginning of the pandemic it struck me all of a sudden that a website can be a gift. Like the example I made a few weeks ago when I wrote about how I made a little website for my girlfriend’s birthday and transformed myself into <a href="https://buttondown.email/robinrendle/archive/be7f666f-0c9e-4992-ab44-f708886a27c6">a Stardew Valley character</a>. I then continued to passive aggressively wish her happy birthday...</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/4eae36a1-099e-40e7-b528-ce3c1ef51cba.png" alt="A picture of the website I made" /></p>
<p>Before that I made a website for a pal’s birthday because he happens to be somewhat in love with Animal Crossing but even more in love with Blathers. So I made a text adventure game where he talked to Blathers and played a little game.</p>
<p>(I am bragging about this one as well because the website even plays the music and everything.)</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/cleanshot-2021-03-22-at-21.33.45-2x.png" alt="A text adventure game inspired by Animal Crossing" /></p>
<p>Finally, for another close friend’s birthday I made a website that mimics a thread of texts sent to her from Jeff Goldblum. Jeff introduces himself and then introduces each of her friends in turn to wish her happy birthday. This was fun because I got to write in Jeff’s peculiar cadence but also got to imagine what my pal would reply in kind:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/cleanshot-2021-03-22-at-21.37.49-2x.png" alt="An example of the website" /></p>
<p>So websites can be serious things; we can turn them into great wells for us to cast our anxieties into, or stress balls for us to relieve the pressure of our lives. But a website can also be a delicately wrapped bundle of words and colors, with the express purpose only to make someone you love smile.</p>
<p>We should remember that every website is a gift.</p>
The Great Bonfire at the End of Time2021-03-23T04:05:26Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-great-bonfire-at-the-end-of-time/<p>James Bridle on <a href="http://booktwo.org/notebook/the-great-bonfire-at-the-end-of-time/">museums, archivists, and art</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>And at some point I had this vision of the great bonfire at the end of time, and how there’s this conveyor belt moving towards it, filled with everything we’ve ever made: every word, every image, every artifact of culture and society, getting closer to the fire all the time.</p>
<p>And the job of places like the Library, of most institutions, and of a significant part of culture, is to keep shoving everything back, away from the fire, to find ways to restore and revive and convert it so that it stays accessible and meaningful and useful and beautiful.</p>
<p>And the job of the rest of the culture is to come up with new things to put on the conveyor belt, making that work so much harder. Sorry.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Damn. <em>Loads blog post onto the great bonfire.</em></p>
Blogging and Dimly Lit Bars2021-03-20T21:06:14Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/blogging-and-dimly-lit-bars/<p>Sloan <a href="https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/many-subtle-channels/">wrote about blogging</a> this morning and so of course I must excitedly reblog this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...the High Blogging Era might be behind us, but there is still blogging to be done, and it is so easy and rewarding to dip a toe in, start to follow a few, and experience a different kind of network.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>There is so much blogging to be done.</em></p>
<p>Yes, so: I have two thoughts about this.</p>
<p>First, reading it reminds me that one of the problems with RSS is that it always prioritizes what's new. You have a tiny little number in a circle, an unread count of wild new things rushing in—but—what's interesting isn't always new. And so this post reminds me that RSS doesn't value <a href="https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/case-for-rereading">re-reading</a> much, at least out of the box.</p>
<p>I try to solve this by relentlessly starring things I love. And sometimes on a lazy weekend I'll go back through this list of favorites to find old blogging treasures, like this piece from Liz <a href="https://bobulate.com/2014/10/on-starting/">on quitting things</a> back in 2014:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We don’t celebrate stopping things, changing our paths, or our minds. Just the opposite. We celebrate finishing things.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Or this piece by Jason back in '14, too. Except this one's about <a href="http://jasonsantamaria.com/articles/discourse-in-web-design">the way we talk about web design</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A website is its own, singular thing. We know it isn’t a book, a TV show, a film, or a song, but our language is limited to talking about it in those restrictive boxes. A website is a mix of all of those things, and none of those things. It is influenced by place and time. A website changes with age. It can evolve and regress.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Or this piece from <a href="https://twitter.com/cassmarketos">Cassie</a> back in '15 (the link to this post is dead now, sadly – all that remains is what Reeder.app caches):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You have to find something meaty to hate, you have to become one with your craziness. You have to be alone. To be very, very good at being alone. My aloneness is like a small, light box. I can pick it up and carry it with me anywhere. My loneliness is an instrument.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And so although Robin writes that "the High Blogging Era might be behind us" we can—and should—return to it often because there are so many old and half-forgotten treasures to dig up. And there might be one or two of those dazzling things that we can resurrect for ourselves.</p>
<p>The second thought I had with Robin's piece isn't really a thought so much as a memory, where Robin writes about Daniel Levin Becker’s book <a href="https://bookshop.org/books/many-subtle-channels-in-praise-of-potential-literature/9780674065772"><em>Many Subtle Channels</em></a> and oh boy <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/adventures/potential-typography-and-the-oulipo">how much did I love that thing</a>.</p>
<p>But I remember something else, too: back in 2018 I followed Jez into a bar in the Inner Richmond after a reading of <a href="https://bookshop.org/books/dictionary-stories-short-fictions-and-other-findings/9780062652614">his similarly lovely book</a>. We gathered together in the gloomiest corner and our pearlescent drinks were dancing in their cups, illuminated by the flickering candle perched on the table. But at one point or another in the evening I made a particularly dumb joke and someone looked me dead in the eyes and called me a complete and utter bastard (in a sort of British, loving way).</p>
<p>After a short beat I realized this was Daniel Levin Becker.</p>
<p>Oh, to be called a bastard by a writer you admire whilst hovering over drinks in a dimly lit bar.</p>
Did you know about the :has CSS selector?2021-03-19T18:46:33Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/did-you-know-about-the-has-css-selector/<p>Wrote this lil piece about the <a href="https://css-tricks.com/did-you-know-about-the-has-css-selector/">:has selector</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>File this under stuff you don’t need to know just yet, but I think the <code>:has</code> CSS selector is going to have a big impact on how we write CSS in the future. In fact, if it ever ships in browsers, I think it breaks my mental model for how CSS fundamentally works because it would be the first example of a parent selector...</p>
</blockquote>
Join the Sentry Design Team2021-03-18T01:12:16Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/join-the-sentry-design-team/<p>The design team at Sentry is hiring a <a href="https://sentry.io/careers/2988841/">UI engineer</a> in San Francisco (no remote, sadly) and so this is a rare opportunity: if you like design systems, front-end development, and shouting at me when I rant about CSS for too long then please reach out and let me know.</p>
<p>Because I want to work with a great UI engineer to help build our design system and work on making our front-end outstanding.</p>
<p>Also, I know I’ve talked a lot about Sentry lately but there’s a good reason why. I think our team is doing extraordinary work—it’s perhaps the first full-time job I’ve ever loved. There’s no politics, no faffing about with endless meetings that lead nowhere. There’s just a lot of actual, honest-to-goodness work to get done.</p>
<p>So get in touch and let’s make something neat.</p>
Hookshot2021-03-17T16:28:20Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/hookshot/<p><a href="https://hookshot.app/">Hookshot.app</a> is real good. I picked it up last night and it matches my mental model for how I want to manage windows on my desktop. Throw that app up there, throw this one down there. Get back to work.</p>
<p>I think Hookshot is the kind of app that I’ll use it every day ten million times but will probably forget the name of it after a couple of months. Hookshot will become so engrained into how I use macOS until it feels like it’s part of the operating system itself.</p>
<p>And that’s the sign of some mighty fine software, if you ask me.</p>
Building Dark Mode2021-03-16T17:35:17Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/building-dark-mode/<p>Over on the Sentry blog I wrote about <a href="https://blog.sentry.io/2021/03/16/building-dark-mode">how we shipped dark mode</a>; what we did, what we struggled with, and ultimately why this was such a great project for our team and our design system:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For most front-end codebases, the design of your color system shows you where your radioactive styles are. It shows you how things are tied together, and what depends on what. Sure, we wanted dark mode to look great. But we also wanted to make sure that dark mode doesn’t slow us down by introducing even more problems than we already have.</p>
<p>And I think that’s what our team achieved here. We made our designs more consistent, buried those radioactive styles, made relationships between colors, and hopefully slightly improved the way we build front-end components moving forward.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>1% better every day.</p>
Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 19992021-03-14T17:49:49Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/cold-lasagne-hate-myself-1999/<p>This standup special by James Acaster called <a href="https://vimeo.com/ondemand/coldlasagne">Cold Lasagne Hate Myself 1999</a> is not only the funniest show I’ve seen in a long time but also has the best explanation of Brexit I’ve ever heard.</p>
<p>If you’ve never heard of James before (he’s very popular in the UK) then you should absolutely check out <a href="https://www.netflix.com/title/80213803">Repertoire</a> on Netflix; it’s 4 comedy specials back to back and I devoured them all in one night. It’s so impossibly good it makes me angry.</p>
RSS, Focus, and Attention2021-03-14T00:28:35Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/rss-focus-and-attention/<p>I love RSS because of how it focuses my attention on the right stuff: big, complex, and contradicting ideas that let you chew on them over extended periods of time. No one can jump into your timeline and hijack your focus or throw junk in front of you.</p>
<p>If you take a week off or a month off, it doesn’t matter. I never feel the pressure to “finish” RSS, unlike I do with email for instance.</p>
<p>Except, well, there’s sort of a problem with RSS. On twitter dot com, retweets often lead to the most powerful ideas—the most interesting people—the notes you might not come across very often (like right now I think <a href="https://twitter.com/WHCOS">Ronald Klain</a> is the best retweeter of them all).</p>
<p>I guess my point here is that sometimes I want my attention pulled out of my feed and sometimes I want to be entirely submerged with the voices I’m familiar with. (This reminds me that I should probably link to more things that catch my eye, and perhaps less time blogging as if it’s therapy.)</p>
The American Rescue Plan2021-03-13T16:36:31Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-american-rescue-plan/<p>Thinking about the American Rescue Plan this morning and I feel light as a feather. It fills me up with something unknown, something almost unheard of during the past year. <br />
<br />
Hope.<br />
<br />
Biden's $1.9 trillion dollar stimulus package is a sign of that, yes. But it's something even bigger than hope. This bill shows us a future where we can not only agree with the policies of the federal government but a future where this is an institution that you can admire earnestly, a competent elected body that doesn't despise you. And goddamn if that isn't something to be extremely hopeful for.</p>
<p>Just <em>look</em> at what's in this bill:</p>
<ul>
<li>Extends unemployment benefits</li>
<li>$1400 checks to folks who need it most</li>
<li>Emergency paid leave for 100 million people</li>
<li>15% increase in food stamp benefits</li>
<li>Expands child tax credit</li>
<li>Forgiven student loan debt (not a part of this bill) will be tax free (if it is forgiven in the future)</li>
<li>Tax increases on the mega wealthy and closing corporate loop holes which will increase federal funding by $60 billion</li>
<li>Billions of dollars in loans and grants to help small businesses</li>
<li>$350 billion for state, local, and tribal governments</li>
<li>Education funding to help schools reopen safely</li>
<li>Housing funding (like 20 billion in rental assistance programs and billions of dollars in funding helping the homeless)</li>
<li>Funding the COVID 19 vaccine rollout</li>
<li>Helping pension funds not go insolvent</li>
<li>Mass funding for transportation</li>
<li>Debt forgiveness for farmers</li>
<li>Billions of dollars for cyber security with $200 million set aside for the U.S. digital service</li>
<li>A ton of healthcare improvements</li>
</ul>
<p>This is what a functional, healthy, and kind democracy looks like. And it's worth reminding ourselves every day from now until the midterms that not a single Republican voted for this bill.</p>
Putting Landsat 8’s Bands to Work2021-03-10T18:44:36Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/putting-landsat-8%E2%80%99s-bands-to-work/<p>Charlie Loyd wrote this great piece about <a href="https://blog.mapbox.com/putting-landsat-8s-bands-to-work-631c4029e9d1">Landsat 8</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Here’s a picture of LA, just like an ordinary digital camera would take (if it had ten times as many megapixels and were in space). The image is only two weeks old, taken from Landsat 8, launched by NASA late this winter. Landsat 8 is already one of our favorite data sources...</p>
</blockquote>
Click, click, click2021-03-10T18:41:34Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/click-click-click/<p>One thing I love about Sentry is that it's <a href="https://github.com/getsentry/sentry">an open source</a> project which means that you can go ahead and look at <a href="https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/commits?author=robinrendle">every line of code</a> I've written over the past year.</p>
<p>You can see me slowly <a href="https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/commit/25f5be962fcc05619fd13e837b0f11245a126204">refactoring our typography</a>, deleting <a href="https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/commit/8a102aa68d45792cf233db75d7f76c3540f35eb0">unused bootstrap CSS</a>, and <a href="https://github.com/getsentry/sentry/commit/8a102aa68d45792cf233db75d7f76c3540f35eb0">replacing our old coding font</a>, Monaco, with IBM Plex.</p>
<p><em>Click, click, click.</em></p>
<p>I don’t know why this is so exciting but perhaps it’s because it feels like blogging, in a way. There’s this warm feeling I get when working/blogging/typing like this in public, a feeling where we can all learn from each other and how we’re all just figuring out how to type better.</p>
<p>I get this same feeling reading through my RSS feed; constant improvement and momentum, without being unhealthy.</p>
Websites? Wobsites. Wibsits!2021-03-08T16:57:51Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/websites-wobsites-wibsits/<p>On the way down to California, my dearest <a href="https://lucybellwood.com/">Lucy Bellwood</a> stopped by to have a fun, distanced chat about websites, online dating, science writing, and Miss Piggy. It’s the first episode in our dark-web-punk-rock podcast: <a href="https://lucybellwood.com/websites-wobsites-wibsits/">I’m Sorry, You’re Welcome</a>.</p>
<p>On science writing, Lucy said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The trouble with science writing is that it is designed to try and be objective. And therefore objective often means "strip every piece of character out of this, because it is a form of editorializing." And I understand that within the field, I get it, but it was so shockingly striking to me where I was hearing from these scientists who were, in person, so passionate about what they were doing. So funny, so interesting, so experienced. Pointing at things and going "Look at this! Wow." Joyce literally had a silk track jacket that had been custom printed for her with the 3d mapping array that she had helped work on for some seamount, which I think is so cool. Okay. Anyway, but you would read their writing and it would be like, where is this person? This person is not present in the writing that I am reading about this project and the writing doesn't accurately capture, for a lay audience or possibly even for a fellow scientist audience, the enthusiasm and tenacity and excitement of the people who are doing the work.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Also, me had this to say:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I think this is the problem in general with web design. The problem with websites is that they're just endless... I don't know how to describe this, but you need to create these borders around the thing. You need to create edges. [...] And the thing I like about, going back to Newsletters, is that with a lot of websites, they have a million links in the footer. And they're always trying to grab your attention. And with that, I wanted to just—it's probably not a good thing for my own personal brand—but it just ends, it just stops. There's just black space.</p>
</blockquote>
Tulip Mania2021-03-07T23:10:46Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/tulip-mania/<p>I’ve long considered <em>everything</em> related to the blockchain to be a poison but I’ve tried to keep an open mind as much as possible. I’ve never played with the technology, never bought a coin, never owned an NFT.</p>
<p>But you really don’t need to know how a scam works to know that it’s a scam.</p>
<p>One evening many years ago, I went to dinner with a friend of a friend and he excitedly bragged about betting his life savings on bitcoin and ethereum. I recognized that gleam in his eyes well—a look I had learned to spot from childhood—where a man was gloating in front of me, boasting about this vast fortune that was roaring towards him from somewhere out there on the horizon.</p>
<p>Everything he said was horseshit and it was obvious from this gleam in his eyes. He told me that the blockchain was the future of finance, bitcoin would be the bedrock of our economy, and not only that but he would become a millionaire within the next six months.</p>
<p>I’ve only studied a few economics classes but I knew then that those two things cannot be true at the same time. We can’t be building the foundations of our economy with this new financial model whilst <em>also</em> expecting to come out on top of this <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania">speculative tulip mania</a> as techno-wizard millionaires. That was obvious to me then and it’s more than obvious after years of folks talking about how valuable the blockchain is with nothing but a runaway bubble and an ecological disaster to show for it.</p>
<p>I sort of pitied this guy, in a way. Sure he was going to be richer than I ever will be, that much was certain. But the way he talked about money, the way he imagined himself on top of people, crunching their poor bones beneath him, the way he saw himself as the master of this vast ponzi scheme—one that only he knew how to navigate...it was pitiable, cowardly, short-sighted. I knew I had to get away from it all at light-speed.</p>
<p>In his vision of the world he didn’t need to create anything brilliant or heartwarming, needn’t build anything of any real value. There was no magic in this vision, and no wonder.</p>
<p>All he saw was a pyramid and his own place within it.</p>
Crypto art2021-03-07T23:08:50Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/cryptoart/<p>Over the past few days I’ve been thinking about this piece by <a href="https://everestpipkin.medium.com/but-the-environmental-issues-with-cryptoart-1128ef72e6a3">everest pipkin on crypto art</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...in a digital context scarcity must be constructed – there is nothing that demands the next block in the blockchain be harder to make than the last. If anything, the opposite should be true – computers grow ever more efficient and powerful. This means any scarcity is artificial, a process that demands ever more energy, ever more resources lost to continue to operate and return, for no other reason than to insure that tomorrow it will be even more expensive – which makes the wastefulness of today a good investment.</p>
<p>This is why cryptocurrency is valuable. There is nothing high-tech about it. There is no miracle. It is simply futures speculation without the speculation – no guessing required, because we know it will be more wasteful tomorrow; it is baked into the tech.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If you’ve heard the abbreviation "NFT" over the past few days but missed this post then it’s a mighty fine explanation of what it is, how it works, and the threat it poses to us all.</p>
Escape Bias2021-03-03T16:46:11Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/escape-bias/<p>The biggest threat to great design is bias.</p>
<p>For example: at <a href="https://sentry.io/">Sentry</a> I’m on the Workflow team. We work on the error monitoring side of things, such as Alerts and Issues. These features notify you when a user experiences a problem with your app—we can send you a notification to say “hey! your app exploded at this point in time for this particular user and this is the problem.”</p>
<p>It’s magic.</p>
<p>The problem here is that because I’m on the Workflow team I see every problem as one that can be solved with what I know and the features that I work on. These feelings are natural because our perspective is skewed: we see ourselves as the protagonist at the center of the galaxy. Try to imagine yourself as an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-player_character">NPC</a>, try to un-think what you currently know about the world and it’ll require some serious four dimensional chess in your brain.</p>
<p>Simply put: if you’re on Team Hammer then you’ll see every problem as one that can only be solved with a hammer.</p>
<p>This bias in the environment leads to bias in design. It encourages me to solve every problem with what I already know, instead of asking more questions, diving deeper to solve the problem at hand. It’s this reason why abbreviations are so prevalent because folks find it so very hard to empathize with people who don’t know what <em>they</em> know. Just learn what I learn, jeez. Shut up.</p>
<p>This bias applies to skills, too. I often see every problem as one that can be solved with typography alone and most days I let this bias get the best of me. But as a designer you constantly have to push away from this bias if you want to make anything half decent. You have to unlearn your environment and the way you see things constantly.</p>
<p>I guess my point here is that we all have bias, we’re all trapped within our little snow globes but there are some fleeting moments where you can push back against the glass—to un-think, un-learn, un-know—and that’s the place where great design can be done.</p>
The Arch of Honor2021-03-02T16:37:53Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-arch-of-honor/<p>Just look at this enormous woodblock illustration by Albrecht Dürer made in 1515. From <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/388475">The Met</a> archives:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Arch of Honor is the artistic summation of Emperor Maximilian I’s ambitions. Combining elements from many of his other commissions, it shows his ancestry, territories, extended kinship, predecessors as emperor, deeds, accomplishments, personal talents, and interests. Among Maximilian’s many ambitious printed projects, the Arch of Honor is the only one that was completed and published during his lifetime. The full visual and textual monument comprises 36 sheets of large folio paper printed from 195 woodblocks.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Don’t forget to zoom.</p>
Inheritance2021-02-27T18:30:10Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/inheritance/<p>I imagine reading the blog of my grandmother: What did she do on her thirtieth birthday? How did she feel when she met my mom? What did she struggle with? Who did she love? What did her voice sound like?</p>
<p>The other day Donny Trương asked what would happen to his website <a href="https://visualgui.com/2021/02/26/inheritance/">in the future</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What will I leave my children when I die? Since I don’t have anything worthy or much money, I haven’t thought about it yet. Yesterday, Đán told me, “When you die, I will read your Visualgui.” I smiled at him and asked, “Will you and Đạo take care of it when I die?” He replied, “Sure, we will take care of it for you.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I thought about this the other day, too. When I die my website will probably stick around until my bank account stops sending money to Hover or Netlify. I guess my brother might have the login details and could start paying for my domain name but then what? If I ever have kids will they take the keys to this thing?</p>
<p>At some point or another this website, this URL, won’t resolve though. Maybe the Internet Archive will stick around for a while, but then everything is locked within this vast archive.</p>
<p>But if my URL is dead, my website dies with it.</p>
<p>My work shouldn’t be presented in the Smithsonian behind glass or anything, I’m just pointing at this enormous flaw in the architecture of the web itself: you’re renting servers and renting URLs. Nothing is permanent because on the web we don’t really own any space, we’re just borrowing land temporarily.</p>
<p>Donny continues:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Yesterday, Đạo mentioned that he had gone through 400 pages of my blog and read posts that were specifically about our family. He is now in 2009 and only has six more years of materials to read through. Only my own son has that much dedication to my writing and that means the whole world to me.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is beautiful. I would love to read my father’s notes and thoughts about what he struggled with; what links he found fascinating, what happened during the recession that crippled our family.</p>
<p>This is impossible because the web didn’t exist until he was in his late thirties. So I wonder if the web will exist for my grandchildren? And if so, then will this tragic flaw—the way the web forgets everything because you’re just renting space—destroy my life’s work for them?</p>
<p>In sixty years will my grandchildren read my blog?</p>
New CSS Tricks and Design Engineers2021-02-25T03:11:51Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/new-css-tricks-and-design-engineers/<p>On <a href="https://css-tricks.com/newsletter/239-new-css-tricks-and-design-engineers/">the subject of design engineers</a> that’s been getting some attention in the front-end community lately (yes I am quoting myself, shut up):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The problem (which I didn’t realize at the time) was that the organization I worked for was ignoring this front-of-the-front-end work and painted everything with the same brush—treating everything as “engineering.”</p>
<p>But when you don’t break up the team into these specialist groups, then that’s how these problems in the front-end begin.</p>
<p>If an organization doesn’t believe in front-of-the-front-end, then that’s going to cause all sorts of anxiety for the people who naturally fit into that role but can’t. So, if you’re feeling that you need to pick a side between design and engineering, then perhaps you’re a “design engineer.”</p>
<p>We need engineers, we need designers, and we absolutely need design engineers to make that connection across the great divide between the front-of-the-front-end and the back-of-the-front-end. It’s only then that we can make truly great things together.</p>
</blockquote>
Pointing at things2021-02-21T07:51:50Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/pointing-at-things/<p>Austin riffed on that bit I wrote about how <a href="https://buttondown.email/robinrendle/archive/8907d5a1-bc42-4a51-a1fb-19e0af6f40ec">blogging is pointing at things and falling in love</a>—but!—he takes it one step further when he writes what <a href="https://austinkleon.com/2021/02/16/pointing-at-things/">good writing is</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Point at things, say, “whoa,” and elaborate.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Gosh I love that. And I think I’ve been darting around this question for <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/indeterminacy">a while now</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...I think we’ve all been taught to write in a style that forgets the reader entirely. My English degree taught me, incentivized me in fact, to write poorly with this sort of obfuscatory language, “nevertheless...”, “in this essay I will set out to...” etc.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>All that stuff is me pointing at me, pointing at a thing. But we should just get out of the way of the thing we’re pointing at!</p>
<p>Just point at things, say “whoa,” and elaborate. I gotta remember that.</p>
Exquisite kestrels disappear2021-02-17T16:41:44Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/exquisite-kestrels-disappear/<p>Lewis Mcguffie, the designer of <a href="https://buttondown.email/robinrendle/archive/kickflip-typography/">Columba</a>, wrote this piece about <a href="https://lewisandhistype.medium.com/exquisite-kestrels-disappear-317fd3f81cc5">designing with scale in mind</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Something will always be in the shadows, or even behind a hill, we may be colour-blind, or a thing may simply be too small to see (the list is endless). To put it another way — things change depending on how big they are.</p>
<p>[...] The design of type requires a knowledge of scale. But with the concession that a typeface will need to be used in a multitude of environments and is effectively a software tool. However, type as illustration does not have to make this concession. An overly ornate letter will likely go no further than the 1080 × 1080 Instagram post it was lovingly crafted for. The letters composing the text you are reading now, is a thing. The other is an illustration, a picture of thing.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There’s something about this piece that I love—the discipline(?) of it. There’s a plodding gentle stroll feeling at work here in the writing; talking about painting and type design and seeing the world, without getting too lofty about it.</p>
<p>Lewis writes about the 15th century Dutch painter Jan van Eyck and how he added such phenomenal detail to his paintings that no-one would ever notice:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He was able to depict in the series of painted panels for St Bavo’s seventy-five identifiable tree, plant and flower species, a large variety of known birds species (as distant silhouettes in the sky), and clouds so detailed they can be recognised as stratus, altocumulus, cirrocumulus and cirrus. However, the Ghent Altarpiece is 3.5 metres in height and hangs well above eye level. Van Eyck’s method of minute veristic realism — which led him to paint birds so detailed that their species is identifiable by silhouette alone — meant that these animals were rendered so small that to the cathedral-going viewer they were imperceivable. Would a cathedral-goer see those tiny details by candle light even sat in the first row of the pews? Hung over the dim altar as they were, Van Eyck’s kestrels would always disappear.</p>
</blockquote>
Why I still use RSS2021-02-16T17:30:31Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/why-i-still-use-rss/<p>Marc wrote about <a href="https://atthis.link/blog/2021/rss.html">why he still uses RSS</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I've already spoken before about my <a href="https://atthis.link/blog/2020/mastodon.html">general disinterest with Social Media</a> but it wasn't until somewhat recently that I decided to really start looking for alternatives - searching for a better way to interact with the Internet. I found my answer in RSS. I enjoyed the freedom to see sources as I wanted, the flexibility to move to a new reader if I wanted, the complete lack of advertising. It was hard to not fall in love with the service.</p>
<p>However it wasn't until I began working from home and everything in my life moved online that I really began to notice how beneficial RSS could be with relation to Digital Wellbeing. By selecting only the sites, blogs, creators etc. that I had a serious interest in, I could effectively remove the negative effects of social media and excessive online usage from my life.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>On a completely separate tangent here: Marc doesn't share his last name or anything and whenever I see that on the web I'm always impressed. There's an alt-timeline Robin who never shared his name on the web and writes outrageous things about the thoughts in his head via a cool pseudonym like <code>Infinite Mess</code> or something I don’t know I haven’t had coffee yet.</p>
<p>Anyway, this reminds me of two things.</p>
<p>First: a while back I tried to learn more about <a href="https://www.kickscondor.com/">Kicks Condor</a> and couldn't find anything about whoever makes that site. And it feels so punk rock to me, not having to be known and putting a distance between you and the reader. It feels so very 20th-century-novelist to me.</p>
<p>And some writers are extremely good at that Sexy Mystery Distance but I think I’m always going to be the opposite end of that spectrum. Blogging is the opposite of all that mystery, in a way.</p>
<p>Second: this reminds me of <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/05/im-not-black-im-kanye/559763/">Coates’s piece about Kanye and Michael Jackson</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...[Kanye] is a god, though one born of a different time and a different need. Jackson rose in the last days of enigma and wonder; West, in an accessible age, when every fuck is a tweet and every defecation a status update. And perhaps, in that way, West has done something more remarkable, more amazing than Jackson, because he is a man of no mystery, overexposed, who holds the world’s attention through simply the consistent, amazing, near-peerless quality of his work.</p>
</blockquote>
Carry Yourself Lightly2021-02-15T23:27:52Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/carry-yourself-lightly/<p>Someone sent me an email the other week and wrote this line that I’ve been thinking about ever since:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>How to talk deeply about a subject but carry yourself lightly?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I have no idea how to do this—to talk about Big and Serious things whilst also not letting it all get to your head. And I find that there are certain subjects like Brexit where I just cannot sit back and relax and debate it amicably with someone. There’s too much anger and vitriol in me about this subject where I always get carried away and suddenly find myself ranting, talking down, bullying someone into submission with everything in my head.</p>
<p>I feel like this question is something I’m going to be thinking about for very long time.</p>
How lucky we are2021-02-11T17:01:42Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/how-lucky-we-are/<p>This post from John Boardley called <a href="https://ilovetypography.com/2020/07/31/inventing-posters-early-printmaking/">Inventing Posters</a> is worth every minute of your time. He looks at the history of engraving, drypoint, and etching illustrations:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Just as the printing press brought knowledge and books to the entire world, so printmaking introduced the broader world to art. These days, when we’re permanently immersed in photos and videos, it’s hard to grasp just how important and revolutionary printing and printmaking were. Today, it’s as easy for me to look at a photo of bison painted on cave walls 40,000 years ago as it is to study the minutest details of a fifteenth-century Dürer woodcut, a sixteenth-century Bosch or Bruegel engraving, or a seventeenth-century Rembrandt etching. How lucky we are.</p>
</blockquote>
The new reading stack2021-02-08T17:26:39Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-new-reading-stack/<p>Tom MacWright writes about the current landscape of <a href="https://macwright.com/2020/12/24/the-new-reading-stack.html">reading on the web today</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Books are amazing, but the options we have to buy books and track our reading are terrible. A lot of us are locked into the Amazon ecosystem - buying books on <a href="http://amazon.com/">Amazon.com</a>, reading them on Kindles. Sites like AbeBooks and Goodreads were quietly acquired by Amazon. Even LibraryThing is now part-owned by Amazon.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Looks like there’s a lot of exciting ~activity~ in this space though: IndieBound, Bookshop, Book Marks, Italic Type, Open Library. It definitely feels like everyone here is circling around the same ideas and trying to figure out what works best when you combine ~books~ with ~the web~.</p>
<p>(Also I highly recommend subscribing to Tom’s blog).</p>
Hygiene Theater Is Still a Huge Waste of Time2021-02-08T17:08:32Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/hygiene-theater-is-still-a-huge-waste-of-time/<p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/hygiene-theater-still-waste/617939/">Derek Thompson</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But the costs of hygiene theater are greater than dry hands for paranoid people. First, it’s absorbing precious resources. Urban-transit authorities have spent <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00251-4">hundreds of millions of dollars</a> blasting their subways and buses with antimicrobial weaponry, even as they discuss the need to cut essential service. Money that should be spent on rides is being directed toward soap. Second, it builds a false sense of security: If you believe that the coronavirus is spread from surfaces rather than the air, you might be more likely to hang out in a restaurant that cleans its tables—increasing the odds that you get sick from an airborne disease floating your way from strangers seated nearby.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>One small note to add here: all this confusion around how the virus spreads is not the federal government’s fault but the previous <em>administration’s</em> fault. That’s a key difference to make here, I think—constantly saying the federal government is nothing more than a fuck-up reads to me now as an extremely dangerous precedent to set. We need to stop blaming the amorphous blob of agencies and staff and blame the managers—the people we voted in—who did not protect us and led to the deaths of more than 460,000 people.</p>
<p>Saying “the federal government” is at fault without pointing at the half-baked mafia boss that ran the show is lazy at best and disingenuous at worst; I strongly believe that complaining about things in this way makes us less willing to expand the scope of services that the federal government provides, less willing to give them the budgets to function properly, and less interested to care for how it all works under the hood. It’s talking points like this—absolute contempt for the federal government—that explains why healthcare is rigged.</p>
<p>In short: always blame the boss.</p>
The Hardest Thing to Measure2021-02-03T17:21:20Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-hardest-thing-to-measure/<p>The other day I linked to <a href="https://youtu.be/eky5uKILXtM">Maciej Cegłowski’s talk</a> about success and remarkably it’s not filled with stuff like “just wake up earlier, you poor idiots” which so many self-help talks are really saying.</p>
<p>There’s a point in the talk I haven’t been able to stop thinking about though where Maciej says “if you just care about the money then it’s easy to measure success.” And I want to finish the sentence because something is just left hanging in the open air that I need to hold onto or say out loud and append to it: real success is the hardest thing to measure. There’s no metric you can point to and say “ah, yes! This is success!”</p>
Foundation2021-02-03T00:15:57Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/foundation/<p>Robin made a few adjustments to <a href="https://society.robinsloan.com/">The Society of the Double Dagger</a> and the new format is great: he’s split up this newsletter into all sorts of micro-newsletters that you can pick and choose from. Not only that, but he’s also going to create a series of secret websites that adjoin each newsletter so we can dive into a subject more afterwards, with the blog post acting as a kind of footnote.</p>
<p>Or a satellite!</p>
<p>In the secret website to Robin’s most recent newsletter, <a href="https://society.robinsloan.com/archive/january-2021/">Foundation (part 2)</a>, he very kindly refers to <em>Newsletters</em> and then mentions one of the biggest problems he has with the web today:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Among the many small violences of the social media platforms is the way they squash every contribution into the same rectangle, framed by the same buttons. They do this so they can assemble those contributions into a larger structure; a timeline. They prefer neat bricks; stackable, interchangeable. Heterogeneous, weird-shaped content won’t do — although it’s interesting to imagine what that kind of timeline might look like…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This particular <em>shapeness</em> of twitter mostly pushed me off of it some time ago and whenever I return it always feels like <em>I’m</em> the wrong shape. I don’t really know what to do there anymore; I can’t capture my voice, my dumb jokes, my weirdness in a way that’s satisfying to me. But, right here on this very website I somehow can.</p>
<p>In that secret backroom newsletter blog post though, Robin adds snippets of video every once so often and it all feels <em>new</em> and exciting to me in a way that many websites aren’t. It’s like Robin is reimagining Vine here and putting his own extremely earnest and charming spin on things. And, if I might be bold, it is the perfect Sloan-shaped vehicle; experimental, bristling with excitement, and inspiring.</p>
<p>To the blog!</p>
Running a Successful Membership Program2021-02-02T23:53:19Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/running-a-successful-membership-program/<p>Craig is back to talk about <a href="https://craigmod.com/essays/successful_memberships/">year three of Special Projects</a> where he describes how this subscription service is working out for him so far:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A membership program should be seen as an accelerant for work you must do. That is, it should be born from the desire for creative autonomy and for an untethered opportunity to explore with great curiosity and rigor, topics that may or may not be explicitly “commercially” friendly.</p>
<p>I harbor no illusions that it’s unlikely for a magazine or publisher to bankroll a thirty-day walk from Tokyo to Kyoto along an old highway, chatting up nearly-dead barbers and looking to place 200-year-old woodblock prints by Hiroshige in conversation with the road of today. Sure, you can cover a small bit of the walk with a magazine commission, but to take the bigger risk of months of research, action, and follow up, you need a more durable foundation. This is where membership programs soar — they are implicit and durable permission machines.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As I finished this piece it dawned on me that Craig is <em>really</em> good at making a thing but <em>really extremely</em> good at making satellite objects around that thing. So: as he’s writing a book, write about the process of making the book or when he’s thinking a big gnarly thought, break it up into lots of smaller pieces that live in newsletters as a half-finished and excitable <em>huh</em>!</p>
<p>Each of those satellite projects are somewhat inspiring by themselves but I particularly love how they all come together in these larger essays.</p>
Indeterminacy2021-01-30T02:07:08Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/indeterminacy/<p>When I look back on work from five or six years ago—heck, I don’t even have to go back that far—I see it clearly now: a few extra sentences here, another repetitive chunk of stuff over there. I’m so desperate to impress and swoon, so desperate to make a reader sit back and declare “ah, yes! Here is a very smart egg indeed!” that I sort of become blind to the complex words that aren’t necessary or the list added to the end of a paragraph where a sentence would do best instead.</p>
<p>There’s so much junk!</p>
<p>This isn’t about minimalism, mind you; it’s about clarity. Expressing yourself so clearly that someone doesn’t have to perform any gymnastics to follow along with what you’re saying. The problem here is that a lot of writers think that the gymnastics <em>is</em> what makes for good writing. And I certainly thought this way, too. I wanted to be seen as a Great Writer of Literature as much as the next chap.</p>
<p>But this sort of thinking will lead to nothing but junk in the end. And I’ve stumbled upon so much...questionable...content...lately that it’s starting to make me sensitive to it. Take this example, where I won’t link to the website or anything because the goal here is to focus on the writing and not blast the writer:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[This website] as a proposition suggests a space of indeterminacy; a set of possible frameworks that allow the unintelligible to flow through them. Perhaps an introduction is all too fixing—enacting a form of pre-emption of what is to come. Therefore, as a reader, you can treat this text as an invitation to move with us through some of the many possible links the contributions generate when read in relation to one another.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I most certainly feel the unintelligible flow through me as I read this: what the heck does any of it mean? I think it might be shortened to something like this perhaps:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[This website] is not one thing, but many. That makes introducing it difficult to describe. However: do not take this as an invitation to explore further, but instead take it as a warning. Take a lantern, take a rope; you might get lost.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Okay, I added some unnecessary juice to it. But that’s basically the point of this paragraph: tell the reader that hey there’s a lot of weird stuff on this website, mention how the articles don’t really click together, make it interesting, and then get out of the way. But instead we’ve been asked to mentally kickflip around words such as <em>proposition</em>, <em>indeterminacy</em>, <em>pre-emption</em>. These words do not clarify, they make the image here much harder to grasp. “Take a lantern, take a rope; you might get lost” isn’t poetry or anything but at least the image in your mind is clear.</p>
<p>When I began reading this website I couldn’t help but wonder if this was an extremely cool website that I just couldn’t parse the language of or whether instead it was a legally binding contract I had stumbled upon.</p>
<p>I reckon so much writing is like this because it’s how we’re taught in school and it’s what’s often considered good writing in our culture. We’re taught that <em>indeterminacy</em> is a smart word that makes us clever and interesting whereas instead to me it suggests nothing but laziness. It was the first word that was typed out and then no one double checked to make sure that 1. it was easy to understand and then 2. it was something I wanted to read.</p>
<p>This is what I call <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/who-the-fuck-is-guy-debord">The Guy Debord Problem</a>: the writer is letting their ego get in the way, they have left open the dictionary on their desk, but are not thinking clearly about the reader. It’s as if they’ve perched a mirror next to their keyboard so that they can see only themselves (the writer) in focus.</p>
<p>But! We shouldn’t be thinking of ourselves at all as we write. We should instead be asking ourselves the most important question when it comes to writing: am I caring for the reader? Is every word, every sentence and paragraph caring for those strangers I’ll never meet?</p>
<p>Am I writing in service of them, or of me?</p>
<p>“Service” here means not wasting their time: avoiding words designed to make you (the writer) sound clever, and never letting an unkind word slip. (You can get mad all you like with your writing, but you can never be petty.) Basically: <a href="https://youtu.be/eky5uKILXtM">“simplify, simplify, simplify. Or, as I like to paraphrase: simplify.”</a></p>
<p>Any bit of writing should be in service to the reader in these ways, but I think we’ve all been taught to write in a style that forgets the reader entirely. My English degree taught me, <em>incentivized</em> me in fact, to write poorly with this sort of obfuscatory language, “nevertheless...”, “in this essay I will set out to...” etc.</p>
<p>It’s all complete junk. And we have to learn to see this junk in the wild if we’re going to banish it from our work.</p>
<p>I also think part of this is because we don’t study bad writing at all, and we jump straight to <em>Macbeth</em> and <em>Paradise Lost</em>. We’re introduced to writing as if we ought to be poets reclining on love seats whereas instead we should treat writing as if we’re editors that are sat hunched around a table, half-drunk and smoking profusely whilst a bar brawl breaks out all around us and we’re on a deadline for tomorrow morning at 8am and—we check our watch—it’s already tomorrow morning, the clock has just violently turned 2am, and we’ve barely finished reading the first draft. All the while we’re overwhelmed because the only way that we can focus on the task at hand is to obsessively keep asking that question, over and over again, each time increasing the volume to shut out the noise all around us and to make sure that we never slip up, not even for a moment:</p>
<p>“Am I writing in service of my reader?”</p>
<p>“Am I writing in service of my reader?”</p>
<p>“Am I writing in service of my reader?”</p>
The Arrow Type Blog2021-01-28T19:24:32Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-arrow-type-blog/<p>Here’s one for your RSS feeds: the blog of <a href="https://blog.arrowtype.com/">The Arrow Type foundry</a>. That’s all.</p>
What is Bigotry?2021-01-27T16:27:59Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/what-is-bigotry/<p>This is a fabulous video by ContraPoints about J.K. Rowling, anti-trans sentiments, and <a href="https://youtu.be/7gDKbT_l2us">what bigotry really is</a>. I love Natalie’s videos for so many reasons—but this video reminds me why. Each of her arguments are like shots from an orbital laser cannon pointed at the earth, obliterating everything along it's path. Natalie points at all the half-assed, lazy, incendiary language that folks use in casual conversation and shows us what it really means, how people really think. And then she burns all those arguments to the ground.</p>
<p>Every time I listen to her I walk away feeling smarter.</p>
The Art of Whaling2021-01-20T18:56:28Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-art-of-whaling/<p>This piece by Jessica Boyall about <a href="https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-art-of-whaling">the art of whaling</a> is equal parts remarkable and horrifying:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The first European settlers arrived at Nantucket, an isolated island some thirty miles from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1659. They built homes, Quaker meeting houses, and cattle farms, swiftly and forcibly colonising the island, which was until then inhabited by 2500 Wampanoag Native Americans. The word Nantucket is a Native American one, meaning either “far-away land” or “sandy, sterile soil tempting no one”. And the colonisers soon found it thus — too small and infertile to accommodate the number of agricultural plots necessary to support their growing population. So they looked to the sea, according to legend quite literally, in 1690, when town selectmen climbed a sloping hill overlooking the southern coast. Here, they watched whales breach the Atlantic’s surface and pronounced the ocean “a green pasture where our children's grandchildren will go for bread”.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>One of the many interesting notes that Jessica makes here is when she describes how whalers didn’t make notes about how gory and miserable whaling was. They drew little illustrations of smiling whales and ignored the terror of it. Reminds me of <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/the-unknown-sea">that note</a> about how Alexandrian scholars never described the Library of Alexandria.</p>
<p>Via <a href="https://adactio.com/">Jeremy Keith</a>.</p>
Hijack2021-01-19T21:43:47Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/hijack/<p>His voice is gone and the world is better for it. Like the <a href="https://twitter.com/kumailn/status/1253486486663475200?lang=en">Kumail Nanjiani joke</a>, I don’t even need to say his name. But for the past five years his voice has poisoned <em>everything</em>.</p>
<p>Those five years taught me that power is no longer about money but about reach as well; true power is the ability to climb into someone’s mind, hijack their attention, and traumatize them. And for every single day of those five years, that's what he did.</p>
<p>It didn’t matter where we were; we might’ve been watching a movie or playing a game or trying to read a book, on the subway or on a plane or at the park. Somehow his voice would find his way in and take hold of our minds.</p>
<p>But now that he’s banned from Twitter, that power begins to wane. I’ve noticed how over the past week that my mind has been mostly free of him—he hasn’t reached inside my head and said something immeasurably stupid and cruel. Of course, he's still dangerous though, and of course he's still a threat. Events at the Capitol earlier this month shows us that this problem is far, far from over.</p>
<p>But if this ban holds I think we'll mark this moment as the one where his dominion over our minds was finally let loose. And we should celebrate that with fireworks and high fives and wild, drunk screams of absolute delight.</p>
<p>However, if the first stage is never hearing his voice then the second stage is no longer hearing his name. In fact, I had this idea the other day for a bot that would crawl the NYT front page and then update a website to say SWEET HEAVENS YES when his name was no longer to be found on it.</p>
<p>Because that will be a wondrous day. And it’s one I cannot wait to see.</p>
The Unknown Sea2021-01-18T20:34:06Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/volatile/<p>Alberto Manguel, writing in <em>The Library at Night</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Web, and its promise of a voice and a site for all, is our equivalent of the <em>mare incognitum</em>, the unknown sea that lured ancient travelers with the temptation of discovery. Immaterial as water, too vast for any mortal apprehension, the Web’s outstanding qualities allow us to confuse the ungraspable with the eternal. Like the sea, the Web is volatile: 70 percent of its communications last less than four months. Its virtue (its virtuality) entails a constant present—which for medieval scholars was one of the definitions of hell. Alexandria and its scholars, by contrast, never mistook the true nature of the past; they knew it to be the source of an ever-shifting present in which new readers engaged with old books which became new in the reading process. Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.</p>
</blockquote>
Season 32021-01-18T00:54:51Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/season-3/<p><em>Adventures in Typography</em> is back, folks! After a far too long hiatus I’m bringing this little newsletter back for what I’m calling Season 3—I’ll publish one each Sunday from now until spring. That way I can give myself a goal without it being too overwhelming and exhuasting.</p>
<p>You can read <a href="https://buttondown.email/robinrendle/archive/newsletters/">the first edition</a> over on Buttondown and I’ll make sure to export it to this very site eventually.</p>
Descript2021-01-15T22:56:40Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/descript/<p><a href="https://www.descript.com/">Descript</a> is incredible; it’s an app for making transcriptions and recording podcasts/videos. The interface for editing everything is absolutely buck wild because you can edit the transcribed text from the audio you’ve recorded and that will then change the audio itself.</p>
<p>Not only that but this thing is <em>designed</em>. Everything feels like it’s in the right spot, presented at the right time. I’m sat here wondering how much of this I can apply to my own work, too.</p>
Accessibility Weekly2021-01-14T02:19:58Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/accessibility-weekly/<p>Here’s a neat newsletter about <a href="https://a11yweekly.com/">the web and accessibility</a> from David A. Kennedy. Looks like a lot of interesting links with each issue and if you’re interested in learning more about a11y then I think it’s most certainly worth checking out.</p>
...and by islands I mean paragraphs2021-01-13T16:54:47Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/and-by-islands-i-mean-paragraphs/<p>Here is <a href="http://luckysoap.com/andbyislands/">a website</a>. Click on it. You’ll find yourself sat in front of a giant pirate treasure map with absolutely no clue as to what it is or how to use it. Scroll around a bit and you’ll see islands of text floating in the open ocean and clicking the landmass next to it, the text will change.</p>
<p>Is this a story? Or is it just a tech demo? I sort of refuse to learn anything more about it because then the mystery of this little website will disappear and I simply adore that. I have no idea who made this, besides “J. R. Carpenter” in the opening text, and there’s no retweet button, no desperate links to reblog it.</p>
<p>It’s almost like this website didn’t want me to find it at all. And today, in what feels like a world wide web filled with shouting noises and high pitched squeals for attention, this is most certainly a wondrous thing. The sheer <em>confidence</em> of that is somewhat inspirational to me.</p>
<p>But! As much as I like the <em>feeling</em> of this website (a giant map unfurled on a table, almost encouraging you to get in close and hunt for clues), I feel like this thing is far too weird for me. Instead, I want to find a story here. I want this to be a text-adventure-murder-mystery-treasure-hunting videogame.</p>
<p>This unfurled map is the absolute perfect format for a game. And I want to steal it for myself.</p>
Katy’s Book Bloggin’ Setup2021-01-11T23:37:35Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/katy%E2%80%99s-book-bloggin%E2%80%99-setup/<p>Dang! I love this <a href="https://katydecorah.com/code/read/">automated book review and publish</a> setup by Katy Decorah. She made a GitHub action called <a href="https://github.com/katydecorah/read-action">read-action</a> to fetch the metadata of a book and add it to a yaml file on her website. After that, Katy then made an iOS Shortcut to review the book from her phone, grab the metadata from that pull request and then publish it to her site. This is so impossibly neat and it’s extremely tempting to steal this idea for my own site.</p>
<p>I’ve always been in two minds about adding book reviews to my site. The maintenance work behind adding the ISBN, adding the image, adding the author, etc. is far too much work and I still think that the blogging process should be as easy as possible to encourage more blogging. And yet for years I’ve been overwhelmingly jealous of Mandy Brown’s <a href="https://aworkinglibrary.com/"><em>A Working Library</em></a>, where she records everything she reads. It’s just remarkable.</p>
<p>Today I’m sharing what I’m read on Instagram because it’s easy and I like making bad jokes about the books I’m reading. But this process that Katy has built is so dang easy and powers this remarkable little archive. In the last week alone I’ve search for [my name] [book name] at least half a dozen times to find an old post about a book that I loved.</p>
<p>Hmmm...</p>
Peak Bullshit2021-01-11T17:13:45Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/peak-bullshit/<p>Jon Lovett’s 2013 <a href="https://youtu.be/JHl80Wmpj40">commencement speech</a> is great:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One of the greatest threats we face, simply put, is bullshit. We are drowning in it [...] I believe we are at peak bullshit.</p>
</blockquote>
Preventing the Collapse of Civilization2021-01-10T18:19:01Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/preventing-the-collapse-of-civilization/<p>Here's <a href="https://youtu.be/ZSRHeXYDLko">a fabulous talk</a> by Jonathan Blow about the quality of software, video games, and...<em>ahem</em>...the end of civilization.</p>
<p>One of the really interesting parts of this talk is when Blow mentions just how much energy is required to teach the next generation; information is often lost in the process and—because of this enormous loss—technology isn’t always on the up and up. In fact, technology often gets worse.</p>
<p>Blow points to technologies and societies that have regressed, such as the Byzantine Empire that knew how to wield napalm or the Greeks who knew how to craft luminescent glass. Both of those technologies were lost because successive generations weren’t taught about them. But ultimately Blow’s argument is this: today software is getting worse across the board, the foundations of it all are not secure because we’re not teaching the next generation properly. It’s all frameworks built on top of frameworks.</p>
<p>Maybe I’m nodding along so violently to this talk because I’m playing through <em>Cyberpunk 2077</em> right now and despite it being a wonder of a game visually, all the characters walk around with phones in their necks or cigars floating next to them as if they’re haunted. Characters pop in and out of existence or get caught in the environment or duplicate conversations overlap. I climb into one car and it changed my character’s skin color, and another car I climbed into wouldn’t let me un-crouch.</p>
<p>So <em>Cyberpunk</em> is the most beautiful and, somehow, the most broken game I’ve ever played.</p>
<p>The foundations are not just worse for games though, where a floating cigar is relatively harmless. For Blow, declining software quality is a hallmark of the end times, a threat to this civilization that’s entirely based on soft (this is what the folks in <em>Cyberpunk</em> call “software” and it bugs me each time they say it but I can’t possibly tell you why).</p>
<p>So: let’s go make better soft (ugh, I’m sorry).</p>
Is Substack the Media Future We Want?2020-12-29T00:34:23Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/is-substack-the-media-future-we-want/<p><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/04/is-substack-the-media-future-we-want">Anna Wiener</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Just as there is “podcast voice”—that inquisitive, staccato bedtime-story cadence—there is Substack tone, a semi-professional quality suited to mass e-mail. Some newsletters convey intimacy, in the language of psychotherapy and self-help, but their style is more polished and structured than that of the looser, rangier blogs of the early two-thousands. “Maybe Baby,” for all its vulnerability, is also aware of itself as a commodity, dialled in to its audience. Still, it’s nice, from time to time, to receive a chatty, engaging, personable e-mail from someone who doesn’t expect a response.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I think Anna hints at something here that I’ve struggled to describe, the way that blogs were somewhat hidden and when you discovered them it was like finding a treasure map; something intentionally obscured from view. Or rather, they felt like they were written for a much smaller number of people and they weren’t necessarily designed to be popular.</p>
<p>Either way, Anna’s piece is annoyingly good.</p>
Etna2020-12-23T05:14:11Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/etna/<p>I spotted <a href="https://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/etna">Etna</a> the other day and it’s pretty remarkable. It’s a new typefamily by Mark Simonson, inspired by wood type in the 19th century, and the <a href="https://etna.marksimonson.com/">micro-site</a> is so much fun even if you absolutely hate fonts and your nemesis is a .woff file. Ahem, anyway—this litte site lets you click-clack different chunks of text together in a big carousel and I think it’s rather handsome.</p>
<p>Make sure to check out the design notes about <a href="https://etna.marksimonson.com/history/">the history</a> of Etna and where all these striking shapes come from, too. And on this note, I love it when type designers do this—when they show history of their work—because their big beautiful typefaces exist on this continuum of other big beautiful typefaces that stretch back for hundreds of years. Remixes upon remixes, <a href="https://etna.marksimonson.com/design/">as Mark explains</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I don’t remember exactly when I first noticed it, but I’ve always liked the the style of engraved lettering used on U.S. currency. At first glance, it looks like a 19th century “fat face”. But it has some distinctive characteristics, such as the really deep brackets on the serifs and the triangular serifs on the arms of the E, F, L, and T...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I wish other folks did this; video game designers, novelists, musicians, artists. <em>Yes! Here is the grand thing I made</em>..., their websites ought to say, ...<em>but this is just one small contribution to the vast timeline of great works that have inspired me. Now pick up your pen, pull up your keyboard, and join me.</em></p>
The Catalogue of Broken Hearts2020-12-18T10:42:45Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-catalogue-of-broken-hearts/<p>Borges was a racist. And Borges wrote beautiful things. The latter does not excuse the former but I struggle to live in a world where both of these things can be true. I've always struggled with it, in fact.</p>
<p>Read <em>The Book of Sand</em> and try to walk away from it without higher hopes for us all. It is pure electric; the kind of writing I aspire to. If I could write anything half as good as this I would die happy. But it doesn't stop the fact from being true: Borges was a racist.</p>
<p>I struggle with this. Namely, how do we confront our heroes when we discover that they're monsters?</p>
<p>Where do we draw the line?</p>
<hr />
<p>If I was the kind of writer to give advice I would sit back, smoke a bubble pipe in my leather chair and, after a hearty and world-knowing laugh, I would confidently announce: "Bury your heroes, because so many of them will disappoint you."</p>
<p>But I'm not that kind of writer and I certainly don't have any answers. I've just noticed that as I've gotten older there are so very few of my heroes left.</p>
<hr />
<p>It's difficult to see the worst qualities expressed in the people you admire the most. And that becomes exponentially harder when the people that disappoint you are your parents.</p>
<p>With mine these were not small or meager quirks, but the big stuff; homophobia, racism, xenophobia, nationalism, fetishizing the monarchy. These disappointments are not easily forgivable; you can't just shrug them off every birthday, Christmas, and New Year. You can't just say "yes, my parents are racist and they voted for Farage and Boris. But I still love them."</p>
<p>Because do I still love them? Love should be about mutual respect, and if someone is not capable of that for someone else then how on earth do they deserve my love?</p>
<p>And so should you love your parents unconditionally, regardless of how toxic and vile their opinions might be?</p>
<p>Well, no. Because there are some acts, some beliefs, that are inexcusable. People say the quiet things loudly, they tell you who they really are. And some things can never be forgiven, nor should they.</p>
<hr />
<p>Becoming an adult, at some point or another, you have to decide where you draw that line. It requires courage and it's the fucking hardest thing to figure out.</p>
<p>Is it okay if that one friend is funny but openly sexist? Is it okay if your mother believes that Brexit was right and just, despite all the evidence to the contrary? Is it fine if you just don't say anything when your uncle is belittling you and says that poetry is "super gay"?</p>
<p>I realize this now: standing up to your heroes is one of the most courageous things you can do.</p>
<hr />
<p>I want to be petty and I want to be mean. It's a week before Christmas and she texts me for the first time in seven months: "Is there any way we can possibly be friends?"</p>
<p>My hands begin to shake, I want to scream and curse. "This almost-ex of yours called you fat," I tell myself. "She dated someone else whilst dating you. She is a sociopath and she is worthy of your vitriol. Go ahead, light her up!"</p>
<p>So I want to be petty and I want to be mean but I don't have it in me. I want to say "I lost 50lbs since we last spoke but you're still an asshole." Of course I don't. I ramble something incoherent and small instead.</p>
<p>It's in moments like this where I realize I have read way too much Alexander Pope. There were a few summers where I read basically everything he had ever written and a lot of it seeps into how I speak sometimes. Little phrases will slip out that are pompous and silly and grandiose. And something of that kind slips out as I text her back:</p>
<p>"I was nothing to you. You can just go ahead and add me to your catalogue of broken hearts."</p>
<p>I laugh after I write it because of how powerfully obnoxious it is. And I feel stupid of course but then I realize there are no words, no coherent sounds that can make all that pain go away. The only thing left to do is draw that line.</p>
<p>And then cut her out my life forever.</p>
<hr />
<p>Borges once said that writing was like revenge but I can never muster any ounce of wit in moments like this. I am the anti-Cicero. I am Bertie Wooster waiting for an absent Jeeves to deliver the final witty blow.</p>
<p>My point: when it comes to love it's always an awkward clown show from start to finish with me. I never really meet the moment and it's always a bit of a farce. I idolize the people I love and it makes it impossible for me to confront them.</p>
<p>But now I'm left alone with discarded heroes all over the place and I'm still wondering where I ought to draw that line. I struggle with this when it comes to my parents and literary heroes, musicians who are assholes, web designers who are toxic, but with my almost-ex now I'm certain.</p>
<p>This is the line. It's right here.</p>
Books for Winter2020-12-10T06:42:34Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/books-for-winter/<p>I’m running out of books, and I need your help. It looks like I’ll be spending Christmas alone here in San Francisco and so I need copious <em>distractions</em>.</p>
<p>So: what is your favorite winter book?</p>
<p>The sort of books that you associate most closely with the holidays and being wrapped up inside with? I guess the first book that comes to mind for some peculiar reason for me is <em>Lincoln in the Bardo</em> by George Saunders. But there’s absolutely zero Christmas cheer to be found in that novel. Only sad ghosts and great writing.</p>
<p>So: send me a little email with your suggestion. Here’s the plan: I hereby announce the Robin Rendle Round Robin Reading Club where I’ll review the books you suggest. They can be anything at all, regardless of genre, but they have to feel somewhat Wintery.</p>
<p>Share away!</p>
The Iliad and the Odyssey2020-12-10T06:18:33Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-iliad-and-the-odyssey/<p>I’ve been reading <em>The Iliad and the Odyssey</em> by Alberto Manguel where he looks at those two epic poems and before you yawn and click away—wait! This book sure is yawn inducing from a mile away, but up close I think it’s extremely interesting.</p>
<p>That’s because these sorts of books are usually quite often terrible. Writing about the classics is hard—I’d say nigh on impossible—because everything has already been said them but also because everyone is trying to <em>impress</em> everyone else, instead of writing clearly. Just like in writing about design, there’s a stuffiness and snooty sort of writing when it comes to literary criticism that I find absolutely unbearable. I’m allergic to the stuff.</p>
<p>But not here! As of course, with all things Manguel, this is a book about books. What he does instead is this: yes, sure, he’s writing about two epic poems attributed to an “idea called Homer.” Yet he’s really writing about how these two stories (what eventually would form two books centuries later, once books had been invented) are loved, interpreted, fought over, and generally just how people <em>struggled</em> with these stories.</p>
<p>Even just <em>thinking</em> about the great expanse of time between us and these stories are baffling. Books did not exist when they formed. For hundreds of years these stories were most likely shared like songs (the original translations show us that they have a lot of repetition which is edited out in later translations). No single person wrote either the <em>Iliad</em> or the <em>Odyssey</em> and bards during that time would sing for room and board, which might explain the length of these stories, too.</p>
<p>My point here is that I find all of this beautiful, the idea that these poems just sort of coalesced over centuries. They were edited, rewritten, destroyed, burned, and banned. They were distorted, broken, added to, updated, expanded, uplifted, and <em>changed</em>.</p>
<p>It is an absolute wonder that these stories still survive. But they also sort of...haven’t. What we read today are not the poems that were sung; we have invented our own <em>Iliads</em> and <em>Odysseys</em> and that’s why I find this book so thoroughly exciting.</p>
<p>Alberto argues that although those stories might be lost in translation and to the ravages of time, there are somehow, even after all these centuries, even more stories left to find within them. Stories within stories and translations within translations. Songs within songs.</p>
My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge2020-12-04T18:27:58Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/my-website-is-a-shifting-house-next-to-a-river-of-knowledge/<p>Last night was manic and dizzying, and it all began with re-reading Alberto Manguel’s book <em>A Reader on Reading</em>. Manguel is one of my favorite writers and if you’ve never read or even heard his name then go and pick up <em>The Library at Night</em> immediately. I command you.</p>
<p>If you’ve ever liked anything I’ve ever written then it was most likely pilfered directly from Alberto. But <em>The Library at Night</em> and <em>A Reader on Reading</em> are really the same books, written about the same topic (and that’s not a criticism at all). Manguel is one of the few writers where I would read anything by him, at any time. Whenenever I read a sentence of his I can hear a fire crackle in the background, the growling of a sleeping dog by my side.</p>
<p>Take this bit, from <em>The Library at Night</em>, which I think about all the time:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We dream of a library of literature created by everyone and belonging to no one, a library that is immortal and will mysteriously lend order to the universe, and yet we know that every orderly choice, every catalogued realm of the imagination, sets up a tyrannical exclusion. Every library is exclusionary, since its selection, however vast, leaves outside its walls endless shelves of writing that, for reasons of taste, knowledge, space and time, have not been included. Every library conjures up its own dark ghost; every ordering sets up, in its wake, a shadow library of absences. Of Aeschylus’ 90 plays only 7 have reached us; of the 80-odd dramas of Euripides only 18...of the 120 plays of Sophocles, a mere 7.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This place here is my library and anti-library. It is full of the worst and best parts of me, and with each I hope to better understand. And then hopefully improve. I want this place to be full of the half-finished things. The stories that aren’t good enough to publish, the ideas half-edited. I want the spelling mistakes and the excitement of not really having a plan when you sit down in front of your keyboard. This isn’t the <em>New Yorker</em>, I’m not here to impress anyone. I’m just a kid with a keyboard, typing and figuring out things as I go.</p>
<p>But it took me a long time to be comfortable with that. And I guess I’m still figuring it all out. Is this place where I’m super vulnerable about relationships? The drama! Or is it where I publish weird little stories that pop into my head? Is it where I focus solely on writing about typography?</p>
<p>What is this place? And, subsequently, who am I?</p>
<p>This is precisely what Laurel Schwulst asks in her essay, <a href="https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/laurel-schwulst-my-website-is-a-shifting-house-next-to-a-river-of-knowledge-what-could-yours-be/">My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be?</a> It is a luminous bit of writing. The sort that skips and hums and doesn’t have a care in the world. Laurel writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What kind of room is a website? Or is a website more like a house? A boat? A cloud? A garden? A puddle? Whatever it is, there’s potential for a self-reflexive feedback loop: when you put energy into a website, in turn the website helps form your own identity</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That’s how I see this place, this anti-library of mine. It is a boat and a puddle, a room to help me make mistakes and to focus my attention in the right spot. But that doesn’t mean your website has to be the same! Because, as Laurel writes so eloquently: a website can be so very many things.</p>
<p>Let us venture forth and build our puddles!</p>
We’re looking for a designer2020-12-01T17:04:57Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/we%E2%80%99re-looking-for-a-designer/<p>Sentry is looking for a <a href="https://sentry.io/careers/2445633/">senior product designer</a> to join the team in Vienna. We’re doing a bunch of exciting work and I wouldn’t link to it here unless I loved my current gig. Also! Get in touch if you’re interested and have any questions about Sentry’s culture or what we’re working on. I’m always happy to chat about that stuff.</p>
<p>Also also! I know every recruiter says this (and it always makes my eyes roll) but Sentry is one of the few companies where designers can make a big impact. It’s not just about moving pixels around and doing what you’re commanded to do. Everyone has a surprising degree of autonomy and so if you’re are an experienced designer who wants to crank out great work then I can’t think of any other place I’d recommend.</p>
<p>I’ve shipped more good work at Sentry in the last month than I did in eight months in my previous gig. It’s bonkers.</p>
Ice Breaker 2020-11-30T06:37:24Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/ice-breaker/<p>This was the job: sit in the tractor, break the ice, save the world. It was boredom beyond boredom, the sort of monotony that stretched out all day long, but each time Marlo climbed into his tractor, the world became safer by a smudge.</p>
<p><em>Never let the ice touch the land. Never let it grow.</em></p>
<p>On one side of the tractor, bolted onto its rickety frame, an enormous drill had been attached; each morning and all day long it was lowered into the ice and with an obnoxious, high-pitched rattle it churned away at the bank of the frozen lake.</p>
<p>And every morning, Marlo saved the world with it.</p>
<p>This winter was especially cold though. Inside the tractor, Marlo warmed his hands on a flask of coffee and turned to face his wondrously melancholic and tired chocolate Labrador, Elsie, who was buried under a mountain of blankets. She occupied the same position that she had for more than a decade now, squidged in between Marlo’s chair and the very back of their tractor. He patted her on the head and she groaned in kind, repositioning herself away from him. And so yes, outside might be bleak and nigh-on atomically desolate but inside this rickety home was all the familial warmth of things in their correct and rightful place.</p>
<p>How many times had they saved the world together? How many winters had they seen out here? Marlo couldn’t remember. And it didn’t really matter. There was a kind of meditation in this boredom, like doing the dishes or waiting for pasta to boil. Saving the world day after day for so very long eventually lost its sex appeal. But it didn’t matter because these morning shifts were his favorite part of the day; hopping into the tractor, taking that first sip of radioactive black coffee, patting Elsie’s head (she would grumble), and then Marlo would glare across the icy lake for several hours in a joyous, brooding contemplation whilst he slowly guided the tractor around the edge of it, churning up all the ice.</p>
<p>Marlo knew, Marlo thought, that if he died right there on the spot then he had played his part. He had sacrificed his life for something noble, just as his father and grandfather had, with countless others like them going back for hundreds of years. There had been so many Ice Breakers in the past but now he was one of only three, each with their own shift. And this was his.</p>
<p>So despite the boredom, this work never failed to make him smile.</p>
<p>But Marlo, Marlo thought again, was a rather humble sort of hero. Marlo was the kind of hero that Marlo couldn’t brag about. But sure, sometimes he would gloat privately to himself about all this; Marlo would stand in line at the grocery store and realize that everyone around him was alive simply because of that morning’s shift. And yes, when someone would cut him off on the motorway, his very first thought would be to skip work the next day and just see what happens to that absolute bastard in the blue Ford Focus. <em>THEN you wouldn’t cut me off, would you lad?</em></p>
<p>But yes, of course, being an Ice Breaker today was certainly a lot easier than it had been. His father once told Marlo that in the time before machines at least six men were on the lake every morning, and every day they would work around the clock with nothing more than a shovel and a—</p>
<p>The drill spluttered and wheezed and the gnashing of teeth stopped.</p>
<p>Marlo hrmphed emphatically. He stretched to see the drill outside but the snow on the window made that entirely impossible and, despite all the commotion, Elsie remained still under the tower of blankets beside him.</p>
<p>One, two, three swigs of coffee later and, climbing outside, Marlo encountered a gust of icey wind that took his breath away. It almost took his scarf along with it as well. And so at first he struggled and stumbled over to where the drill was attached. He assumed rocks had jammed it all again but everything looked...fine. Maybe it was another electrical problem. Might need to walk back to the cabin and get the toolbox and come back to see what’s going on under the—</p>
<p>Marlo looked out over the lake. He was almost half-way done with this shift, but somewhere out there, he could now begin to hear a song. It was faint, but it was certainly a melody of some kind. Quiet, but growing.</p>
<p>In fact, the song was <em>moving</em>. As if it was being carried by the wind almost. It was no longer on the horizon, but now it drew closer, then suddenly it was very far away. It was coming from the furthest tip of the lake now, out there all the way on the other side. The wind shifted again, forcing Marlo to zip his jacket up to the very top, and the song moved with it. Now...the song...the something...was coming from under the ice itself. From under the lake.</p>
<p>Marlo climbed down half a step onto the bank. The song grew louder as he approached it, although it kept moving, as if the song itself was dancing across the ice, playing with him. Taking a knee, Marlo put a gloved paw on the ice near the drill and could feel a slight vibration that changed and turned with the movement of the song. This had never happened before. <em>What the hell was going on?</em></p>
<p>Marlo removed a glove and reached out once more, only now with a soft, pink hand extended, he touched the ice.</p>
<p>The music stopped. And then, after a moment, it was everywhere, and <em>everything</em>.</p>
<p>Loud, soft, orchestral, synthetic. Voices packed on top of even louder booming voices. Marlo realized now that what he’d heard wasn’t just a song, but also a conversation. Or many overlapping conversations within a song. He could faintly hear his grandfather joining the swell in a chorus, he could hear Julia’s whisper in his ear and Jeremy’s enormous “Allo!” across the barren lake. And then—a bark!—somewhere out there in the distance, on the horizon, but somehow made clear, was Elsie’s father, Bob. The barks were interrupted by someone’s melodic plodding of Latin, someone’s name he couldn’t remember from grammar school, and the singing was in a language Marlo didn’t recognize. The sound knit together all sorts of banter and crowds of people talking, all of them layered together on top of each other, into the song’s myriad puzzle pieces. It was almost as if Marlo could direct the song as he focused on certain parts of it. Julia’s whisper became a nursery rhyme, but when he focused on the distant crying of a young baby, Marlo gasped and withdrew his hand in shock.</p>
<p>That sound. It was impossible.</p>
<p>The isolation of the lake returned to him. The song had disappeared and now he was alone, save for the rattling of the wind. Marlo wiped his face and found that he had been crying. Without hesitation he climbed onto the lake, now on all fours. He was desperate for more of it, whatever it was. He kept crawling further out until he heard the song return. But this time laughter was stacked on top of laughter, the song had disappeared. Actually—no. The laughter had stopped now, too. Marlo couldn’t hear anything at all because all he could think about was the overwhelming taste of cinnamon on the tip of his tongue and his belly warming with a post-stew glow. He could feel cider bubbling from the tip of his toes up to his knees and he felt the joy of returning to a warm home and a fire with someone you love, someone talking and cooking close by, someone making just another house your home. And the only place you want to be.</p>
<p>Marlo gasped and removed the other glove from his hand, spreading his fingers as wide as possible on the ice this time. Damn the cold, damn everything but this feeling and the memory of that sound. The music began again and Marlo clawed at the ice with both hands. The song was soothing, caressing, holding him together from the inside. And then he could hear the cries of that boy again.</p>
<p><em>Is that you?</em></p>
<p>Looking down from above, underneath Marlo outstretched on the lake, you would see a vast shadow move across the ice and then stop. The gargantuan shadow vibrated, violently, until it broke itself up into fragments, darker in patches, lighter in others. It kept splintering and moving until the lake resembled the buzz of an old television. But the shadows all soon faded away, taking the song and the giggling and the taste of cinnamon along with it.</p>
<p>Marlo grasped the ice, not wanting to let go and cried again as the last fragment of the song left him. After what felt like an age he stood up, shaking. The song, the voices, his friends and family evaporated. All that was left was a hateful thought, a plan laid out before him, a future of terrible things that now must be done.</p>
<p>For his boy. For all this music to be set free.</p>
Why the web is such a mess2020-11-29T20:46:01Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/why-the-web-is-such-a-mess/<p><a href="https://youtu.be/OFRjZtYs3wY">This video</a> by Tom Scott about the early history of the web and how we found ourselves in a nightmare of popups and bad web design is worthy of your time. Tom walks through the EU’s legal confrontation with shady advertisers and why so many people are incentivized to be jerks.</p>
<p>Something like this comes around every so often. First it was popups, and browsers faught back—blocking popups by default. Then cookies, which the government sort of clumsily fought back against. Not so long ago it was large interactive ads and now today it’s sort of a combination of enormous ads and Bitcoin (ugh) mining where someone will effectively hijack your computer to run stupid math problems so that they can gather $0.0004 a day.</p>
<p>I get the need for advertising on the web, but what I don’t get is this sort of approach where a large number of people see the web as a gold mine—a place to extract resources from—instead of as a community to contribute to and build up over time.</p>
The literary life of Octavia E. Butler2020-11-28T07:16:37Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-literary-life-of-octavia-e-butler/<p>Via <a href="https://www.susanjeanrobertson.com/links/link-literary-life-octavia-butler/">Susan Jean Robertson</a>, here’s a story about <a href="https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-libraries-octavia-butler-books-life/">Octavia Butler's life</a> for the LA Times by Aida Ylanan and Casey Miller—they’ve made a particularly lovely story here by binding the map of Butler’s life with the format of the site itself.</p>
<p>It's all focused on a bird’s eye view of LA—as you scroll, the story jumps from one location in Butler’s life to the next with these tiny cards. But I sort of finished this story wanting so much more. This format has a ton of promise and I wanted to see it used in some other way, but it also left me wanting to read so much more about Butler’s life, too.</p>
<p>This reminds me that earlier this year I read <em><a href="https://bookshop.org/books/parable-of-the-sower/9781538732182">The Parable of the Sower</a></em>, the only novel I read of Butler’s, and I entirely adored it. But it also stressed me out...in...the best possible way? Go read it, but make sure to sandwich it in between two very soft and calm books.</p>
It’s Time to Hunker Down2020-11-26T07:58:17Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/it%E2%80%99s-time-to-hunker-down/<p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/11/lock-yourself-down-now/617106/">Zeynep Tufekci</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is a Turkish saying for times like these, when we can see a light at the end of the tunnel: “Time passes quickly if we can count the days until the end.” We are no longer in the open-ended, dreadful period of spring 2020, when we did not know if we’d even have a vaccine, whether any therapeutics would work, and whether we’d ever emerge from the shadow of this pandemic. We can see the cavalry coming, but until it’s here, we need to lock ourselves down once again.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This Thanksgiving will be the first I ever spend alone. Every close friend in SF has left, I’m not talking to the cool goth lady I’m in love with, and my family is locked 5300 miles away across an ocean. And I certainly don’t say this to bemoan my situation. It’s just a peculiar feeling, knowing that we’re in the middle of a howling storm we cannot see, our comrades are in terrible pain, but there are visible signs of progress, of hope. We’re nearing the end of this thing.</p>
<p>But this last stretch of self-imposed isolation is vital to shelter us all from the storm. This is what I tell myself when the loneliness kicks and bites.</p>
I Was Tough, Now I’m Needy2020-11-25T20:46:25Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/i-was-tough-now-i%E2%80%99m-needy/<p>Heather Havrilesky’s <a href="https://askpolly.substack.com/p/i-was-tough-now-im-needy-how-do-i">life advice</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The good news is that once you understand the things that trigger you, attract you, make you anxious, relax you, etc, the whole world looks a lot less complicated: You seek worthy judges in life and you throw yourself at their feet. Or you play the worthy judge for someone else. Watching how that plays out for you will actually confuse and upset you at first, and you’ll be knocked over by a wave of shame, but sit with it and keep observing. Tolerate your self-hatred and watch yourself every time you get the urge to catch a bird and leave it on the doormat, then hide in the bushes, anxiously waiting to see if it’s good enough.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>“Tolerate your self-hatred” is a woof-worthy sentence if I’ve ever read one.</p>
The Bad-Yet-Daring Things We Do2020-11-24T16:50:04Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-bad-yet-daring-things-we-do/<p>Over the course of a summer it all clicked for me. I mean how computers are for much more than playing Zoombinis and making spreadsheets. And I cannot describe how liberating that felt. My life today is still buzzing in the afterglow of that one delirious summer when it clicked. Because within six weeks I had discovered the magic key—as I’m sure that everyone does—that no matter how talented or brilliant someone is, they’re only a couple of YouTube videos ahead of you. With a computer you can write songs and make music videos and learn how to play guitar and edit photographs and build a website better than the NYT in just a few sleepless nights because I can, too.</p>
<p>On one of these long summer nights I stumbled upon SONOIO, a gloriously dark and mesmerizing synth band, and at that point I had begun my descent into web design and Nine Inch Nails fandom and learning about MIDI and amplifiers and CSS. Returning to SONOIO today I can still see myself hunched over my desk in that summer delirium where I was welding all these disparate things together. Trying to figure out what computers are for, and figuring out who I am in the process, too.</p>
<p>The first computer I ever bought for myself, a white plastic shell MacBook, was and still is the most startling and beautiful little machine. It felt like a toy. And as soon as I opened it up I knew what it was designed to do and I suddenly understood what all computers really ask of us: remix absolutely everything. I’m talking about the purest joys of computers here when you take something beautiful or busted and then fine tune it or blow it up just because you can.</p>
<p>Speaking of which, one evening in that delirium I was listening to SONOIO’s Houdini over and over again and it struck me that I could just make a music video. That was a thing you could just <em>do</em>. I had no idea how of course, I’d never edited video together before in my life, but dangit I had all the chaos emeralds in front of me and an endless supply of Diet Coke. Who the hell was going to stop me?</p>
<p>I began by downloading every recording that exists of Harry Houdini and I found archive after archive teeming with resources. This might’ve been the first evening I heard of The Internet Archive and I’m sure my eyes popped out of my head when I found it and started reading about The Presidio. Perhaps that evening was when the very first thought of San Francisco popped into my head.</p>
<p>Anyway, I started taping all these brief video snippets together in my bedroom until I had made a music video. A few minutes later and I had uploaded it and then crashed into bed. When I woke up in the morning I found that SONOIO himself had stumbled upon the video and shared it with his fans. It certainly hadn’t become a YouTube success in the same way we might consider one today, but I still cannot describe that feeling. It’s the very same feeling that writing gives me today, that sensation of closing the gap between people across a vast distance.</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ev5TT0eUwEU" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>It’s not great, or even good. Okay, okay. It’s pretty embarrassing. But the reason why I’m still bragging about it ten years later is because we should be proud of all the bad-yet-daring things we do.</p>
<p>Even if it’s a dumb music video.</p>
Front-end Bloggin’2020-11-19T17:19:21Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/front-end-bloggin%E2%80%99/<p>Over the past few weeks I’ve made a few notes about some front-end things for CSS-Tricks. First up, I wrote about the <code>flex-grow</code>, <code>flex-shrink</code>, and <code>flex-basis</code> CSS properties and a <a href="https://css-tricks.com/understanding-flex-grow-flex-shrink-and-flex-basis/">simple trick to understand</a> the <code>flex</code> shorthand that you see like this:</p>
<pre><code>.child {
flex: 0 1 auto;
}
</code></pre>
<p>This scared me for the longest time but once you sit down and actually learn how the other CSS properties work then this is certainly less scary.</p>
<p>After that I wrote about <a href="https://css-tricks.com/measuring-core-web-vitals-with-sentry/">Measuring Core Web Vitals</a> and how we let folks do that with <a href="https://sentry.io/">Sentry</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What’s the most important performance problem with your app right now? This is a trickier question than we might like to admit. Perhaps a First Paint of five seconds isn’t a dealbreaker on the settings page of your app but three seconds on the checkout page is unbearable for the business and customers alike.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sentry lets you monitor a bunch of fancy new performance metrics in order to understand what the most important issues in your app are today. Like I say in the post, I’m not trying to advertise Sentry here—my point is that the tools in our industry are getting better and better at showing us what customers are actually experiencing. I just hope we get to see improvements here because performance is <em>bad</em> on the web today.</p>
<p>Also I somehow stumbled upon an old post of mine when it comes to performance and web dev called <a href="https://css-tricks.com/no-absolutely-not/">No, Absolutely Not</a>. And I still like that one.</p>
<p>Anywho, I also wrote about the <a href="https://css-tricks.com/grid-auto-flow-css-grid-flex-direction-flexbox/"><code>grid-auto-flow</code></a> CSS property the other day. It’s <em>sort of</em> like <code>flex-direction</code> but for Grid. It’s kinda neat and a good CSS property to have in your back pocket.</p>
Begin Again2020-11-19T07:28:11Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/begin-again/<p>I saw Eddie Glaude as all good things used to appear—in a flash, captured somewhere in a snippet of video in my timeline. I can’t remember how and when and where but I remember thinking “holy shit, I want to read something like this.” A quick scan later and I found <em>Begin Again</em>, a book written by Glaude earlier this year, before the election, about where we are and, more importantly, <em>who</em> we are.</p>
<p>It is also a book about James Baldwin—one of the greatest writers to have ever lived. Glaude takes a running hop, skip, and jump at Baldwin’s work. Which is so entirely fascinating because Baldwin’s feelings about America changed throughout the Civil Rights Movement and into the terrors of the Reagan administration. His notes were constantly in flux.</p>
<p>But Baldwin was consistent on one front at least. Throughout all his interviews and essays and novels, he only asks us to look and see who we really are. Glaude writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Baldwin saw clearly what he was up against; he fully understood the power of the American lie. It is the engine that moves this place.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What is the lie that Glaude and Baldwin refer to? Well, it’s the story we tell ourselves about America, as Glaude explains later:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...any admission of such evils in our past is so thoroughly damning that some white people are loath to admit the reality in any form. For those who cling to the idea of America, so to speak, the fear is that such an admission about, for example, the evil of slavery would make us—and the idea—completely irredeemable.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We (white people) tell ourselves the lie in order to preserve our idea of America. The land of the free, the home of the brave. But Baldwin argued that by telling ourselves this lie then we hold ourselves back.</p>
<p>And all of America with us.</p>
<p>I noticed this lie in England—any mention of India is strictly forbidden. We’ll happily talk all day long about the Vietnam War and the evils of the Soviet Union but when it comes to how the British Empire and India...no. You’re simply being disrespectful for bringing it up. In fact, I’ve always sensed this from British people that they should be <em>glad</em> for the colonies. The implication is that we civilized them and they should be grateful.</p>
<p>So many lies.</p>
<p>Criticizing our homeland is not important in order to bring up drama. It’s not done in the spirit of trying to fling trash everywhere and make yourself sound somehow better and feel superior in the process. It’s about revealing the truth about what this country is so that we can change it. Baldwin believed that without the lie, we can fix our country.</p>
<p>Glaude continues:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I would like us to do something unprecedented,” Baldwin wrote in 1967, “to create ourselves without finding it necessary to create an enemy.” In interviews with leading magazines, on television shows and in speeches across the globe, he had relentlessly deconstructed America’s race problem as, at its root, a fundamentally moral question with implications for who we take ourselves to be. Sure, policy mattered. Power mattered. But in the end, for Jimmy, what kind of human beings we aspired to be mattered more.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is what Black Lives Matter asks of us, I realize now. It asks who we are in order to fix who we want to be.</p>
<p>Throughout the book, Glaude takes Baldwin’s writing from the 60’s and 70’s and then applies them to our present moment. Baldwin is hopeful at times, broken and angry and relentless in others. But goddamn I adore every moment of his writing.</p>
<p>Like this part, which I hope to etch into my memory, where Baldwin wrote about the murder of Martin Luther King:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Perhaps even more than the death itself, the manner of his death has forced me into a judgement concerning human life and human beings which I have always been reluctant to make....Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Glaude’s book is a celebration of Baldwin’s work and life, and a plea for white people like myself to confront the lie that is at the root of all our problems. And it’s the best dang book I’ve read all year.</p>
Impress Yourself 2020-11-17T07:48:23Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/impress-yourself/<p>She once texted me from a train. "I am enjoying my own company, giggling to myself," she said.</p>
<p>O was not a good person, but she was dazzling. Because in those rare moments in which she loved herself it was impossible not to agree with her. And I saw that happen many times; strangers buckling at the knees because of all that explosive energy. The way she'd move, the way she'd hop from one subject or language to the next. The way she'd know the cross streets of a random city or the political party of some Eastern European country, or somehow have memorized a 14th century French poem, or the way she could utterly destroy someone's ideas and yet leave them charmed and smiling as they left her.</p>
<p>I often play this game with my brother, Crick, when we're bored: what are all the important things that school never taught us? Mostly we end up listing social things like how to reply to an email, how to shake someone's hand, how to look them in the eye and nod. But sometimes they're parlor game stuff: I'd like to be able to remember every joke in the world, etc. And O was like the culmination of everything my brother and I dreamed of becoming. Socially electric, like George Clooney on handsome steroids, with all those social ticks and awkward pauses ironed out. A neutron bomb of confidence.</p>
<p>I guess my real point here is that when O loved herself, she loved the world around her with every minute detail. A handshake. A giggle. A book. A shadow on a beach.</p>
<p>That type of energy is certainly much rarer for me. I'm sure I don't need to tell you that, I don't hide much. In order to lug myself into that place where I adore myself though requires a mountain of effort, and it only lasts so long. Half a day at the most. Then it all comes crashing down around me.</p>
<p>With Adventures I wanted only to bottle the moments where I'm an endless fount of love for myself. But I'm starting to think it's a requirement for good writing, and not just for making a newsletter about fonts, or, you know, being happy in life. Or whatever.</p>
<p>The words and jokes and sentences only click when I'm sitting right, when all the planets are aligned in my garden, when I truly love myself.</p>
<p>There are exceptions, sure.</p>
<p>But I'm starting to think that the goal of any writer should be to charm themselves silly. Don't impress your friends and certainly don't try to impress me. Impress yourself.</p>
<p>You will never hear me say this in any other context, but we must all aspire to be like O on that train, hurtling through a valley in the middle of absolute nowhere, but in complete childish love with ourselves, open arms in adoration and the deepest sense of repose, of confidence.</p>
<p>You can tell when writers are really enjoying themselves. When they're hiding that wry smile, the one you can only sense at the very edge of the page. It's the hero about to be murdered, the twist about to be turned.</p>
<p>And they're having a hell of a time.</p>
Voting is Not Enough2020-11-13T19:17:38Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/a-week-of-tears/<p>We knew Biden and Harris were going to win days before they did, but when the call came on Saturday morning I found myself without excitement. I didn’t shout “yahoo!” or jump up and down. Short bursts of relief were punctured by the knowledge that it was four years of unnecessary cruelty and an incompetence that seemed so infinite, so uncompromising. It felt somewhat wrong then to celebrate because it’s not over yet and it won’t be until January.</p>
<p>But I wept all the same.</p>
<p>I’m certainly not shaming anyone who felt like celebrating—dear god, please find any moment you can to feel good—but it’s worth noting that ignoring politics can never be an option again. The reason why Democrats lost the Senate in 2012 and lost the White House in 2016 appear to be for the same reason: our side failed to build a political machine to combat the right wing media empire. All that grass roots organizing fell apart after Obama was elected and we took our eyes off the ball.</p>
<p>It’s taken 8 long years to build that organization across the country, state by state. And now we have to build on it.</p>
<p>One thing that shocked me this year is that all my friends got involved; writing letters, sending text messages, making phone calls, getting people out to vote. This is what we need to keep up after January if we want to make forward progress, actual progressive momentum. Voting is not enough.</p>
<p>So this weekend I’m going to be joining a text bank with <a href="https://fairfight.com/">Fair Fight</a> to help Georgia take back the Senate. It’s not saving the world or anything but I see it as an extremely small way to continue the momentum that we’ve all built up over the last year. Because progress is not made federally every four years, but locally every single day.</p>
<p>And it took me such a long time to see that.</p>
Prop 222020-11-05T22:52:33Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/prop-22/<p>Prop 22 passed in California, and Alex Press wrote about <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2020/11/proposition-22-california-uber-lyft-gig-employee">why it’s devastating</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>On Tuesday, California voters passed Proposition 22, a ballot measure backed by app-based “gig” companies that exempts them from classifying their estimated three hundred thousand workers as employees. Included in Proposition 22’s fine print is a requirement that the measure cannot be modified with less than seven-eighths of the state legislature’s approval, all but ensuring it cannot be overturned.</p>
<p>[...] The proposition’s backers bombarded Californians with misleading mailers, ads, and in-app notifications in the lead-up to the vote. As the Los Angeles Times reports, Yes on Prop 22 spent $628,854 a day: “In any given month, that ends up being more money than an entire election cycle of fundraising in 49 of California’s 53 House races.” In addition to hiring nineteen public relations firms, some of which made their name working for Big Tobacco, the companies bought surrogates, donating $85,000 to a consulting firm run by Alice Huffman, the head of California’s NAACP, effectively allowing them to cynically present themselves as on the side of racial justice, even as the measure will further immiserate drivers, the majority of whom are people of color. This veritable flood of money makes Proposition 22 not only the most expensive ballot measure in California history, but in the history of the United States.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I think if we are ever in need of a fight then a good question to ask is “what does Uber want?”</p>
Random Button2020-11-05T05:33:54Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/random-button/<p>Election anxiety has led to a small website cleanup today. To the ol’ blog I added a reply link that lets you pop open an email directly to me — emails I get from here are a pure delight and I want to encourage many more conversations like that.</p>
<p>I also added a random link button to the bottom of a post. It’s partly inspired by that <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/10/30/style/election-stress-relief.html">NYT election distractor</a> but also by older blogs where there’s no rhyme or reason to the organization of things. You just get thrown in the deep end and have to figure out what the hell is going on. We’ll see how long it stays but it’s fun to see random and weird posts where I was writing about nonsense.</p>
<p>(Thanks to Raymond Camden for <a href="https://www.raymondcamden.com/2020/10/26/selecting-random-posts-in-eleventy">his walkthrough</a> on how to create random links with Eleventy.)</p>
<p>Still no luck on fixing the iOS/Safari flexbox <code>overflow: scroll</code> bug on mobile. I looked into it a bit and it absolutely <em>must</em> be a bug at this point, so I should probably file a ticket. Basically on mobile there’s an annoying horizontal scroll which is caused because of the header. But! The header has <code>overflow: scroll</code> applied to it and other browsers respect my CSS, as they darn well should. It’s so very rare for me to encounter browser bugs like this anymore so it’s both annoyin’ and suprisin’.</p>
<p>Finally, I tidied up the fonts. I’m now using <a href="https://www.typotheque.com/fonts/greta_sans">Greta Sans</a> by Typotheque. It has a bit more of a formal feel but I much prefer reading it on smaller screens now. Oh, that reminds me — I also improved the light theme of the site which had been bugging me for a bit.</p>
<p>Yay for anxiety!</p>
Writing about Typography2020-11-04T21:47:57Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/writing-about-typography/<p>Students at the Plantin Institute of Typography in Antwerp documented their research of the 18th-century Belgian punchcutter Jacques-François Rosart and turned it into a fabulous website called <a href="https://www.rosart.nl//">The Rosart Project</a>. But what’s so interesting here is that the research was treated as a network of publishing projects; an archive, a book, a typefamily, a website.</p>
<p>First up, the team photographed Rosart’s dazzling punches from the North Holland Archives in Haarlem:</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<figure class="m-wrapper--unpadded">
<img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/rosart-punches.png" alt="A photograph by Walda Verbaenen of Rosart’s punches" />
</figure>
</div>
<p><small>Photos by Walda Verbaenen</small></p>
<p>...and then they wrote a nifty book about their research. But not only that, the team then made revivals (or remixes) of Rosart’s letters, creating a number of lovely fonts in the process. Especially these flourished capitals below:</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<figure class="m-wrapper--unpadded">
<img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/decorative.jpg" alt="An example of the flourished capitals from The Rosart Project" />
</figure>
</div>
<p>Besides the course-as-publishing-project, here’s another punk rock thing: the students all worked towards building this typographic system together. This is odd because most type courses work like courses of any field: students are effectively in competition with one another, working on their own projects. But this seems like a much healthier way to foster collaboration and to create a more beautiful, complete thing.</p>
<p>Also? The website is fantastic and did I mention that this whole publishing platform thing is <em>fascinating</em> to me? It’s how all courses should be run. Students working towards a single goal, making things together, and then publishing all that work to the outside world.</p>
<p>But there was a moment in reading about all this where I started to feel the familiar oof of typography writing. It’s the part where the website describes what a type design revival is:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A revival is based on historical models, made suitable for contemporary use, adapted to the typographical and technical needs of today, but nevertheless relies on a personal response to the historical style.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is where things began to sour for me because—ugh—what does any of this mean? The words make sense but it’s written in a style that’s familiar to anyone that reads about the field of typography. It’s what’s known to folks outside the field as “academic writing” but it’s what I consider to simply be bad writing—it’s waffling and unclear. In my experience, the word “nevertheless” is a good sign that a paragraph needs to be ejected into the Sun and the whole piece desperately requires a rewrite. As much as that might hurt.</p>
<p>Read this sentence again though because I think it’s extremely important if we want to become good writers, regardless of the field in which we write:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A revival is based on historical models, made suitable for contemporary use, adapted to the typographical and technical needs of today, but nevertheless relies on a personal response to the historical style.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The most damning problems here are technical; it’s difficult to read and it’s unclear. But worse again it’s <em>boring</em>. Look at the photographs of Rosart’s punches, or the book, or the design of any of those fonts. Look at the visual design of the website and how gobsmacking it all is packaged together and then read that sentence one more time:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A revival is based on historical models, made suitable for contemporary use, adapted to the typographical and technical needs of today, but nevertheless relies on a personal response to the historical style.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There’s no dance, no swagger to it. It’s like walking through a swamp of porridge in the dark. There’s nothing to play with, nothing insightful or childlike, and so it functions as most writing does today: simply fulfilling a word count.</p>
<p>But writing can be so much more than this. Every sentence can be as playful as the flairs in a type designer’s serifs, as straight-forward and focused as the great marble chunks they cut out of each letter.</p>
<p>Now I know I’m being quite mean when I point to this one sentence over and over again but I’ve noticed this style of writing bleed into almost every subject. The very worst kind of writing is this academic style (followed shortly thereafter by the writing found on art museum placards).</p>
<p>Okay, so we get it. The words ain’t good. How do we fix them? How do we avoid falling into the trap of this style? Well, let’s attempt a rewrite:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Type designers will often look at letterforms that were made in the past and then redraw them for modern day use. This is called a “revival” by the type community but I like to think of it as a remix: a type designer will unavoidably apply their own style and harmonies, their own deviations and melodies to the song.</p>
<p>Every remix is different, every remix is important.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s not great, but it’s certainly better. There’s not much dance or swagger to it and it’s not High Literature but dammit I can now read the thing and I don’t have to, parse, the, thoughts, with, so, many, commas. It feels like the writing has a point of view, with something reasonable to say. It feels like I’m talking to an excitable friend.</p>
<p>It sounds like a person is writing.</p>
<p>I think this is the most frustrating thing about being interested in the field of typography. The art is beautiful but the description of the art pales in comparison to it. And whenever I read almost anything about typography I find myself nodding off, getting frustrated, or reminded of Orwell’s <a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/"><em>Politics and the English Language</em></a>, an essay where Orwell grabs us all by the lapel and begs us to bring more to our keyboards:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning. Words like <em>romantic, plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality,</em> as used in art criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not point to any discoverable object, but are hardly even expected to do so by the reader. When one critic writes, ‘The outstanding feature of Mr. X’s work is its living quality’, while another writes, ‘The immediately striking thing about Mr. X’s work is its peculiar deadness’, the reader accepts this as a simple difference opinion. If words like <em>black</em> and <em>white</em> were involved, instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that language was being used in an improper way.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I want to underline how much I adore The Rosart Project and I only criticize it because I want to see the whole typographic community break the shackles of this style of writing. So here is my advice for type designers, if I might be so bold: write to swoon, to convince, to make a stranger fall in love. Abandon the academic style, because it’s making your beautiful work so very boring.</p>
The Weekly Planet2020-11-03T23:48:05Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-weekly-planet/<p>Robinson Meyer just started a newsletter about the environment called <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/sign-up/weekly-planet/"><em>The Weekly Planet</em></a> that I’m pretty excited about. He’s on the climate crisis beat for <em>The Atlantic</em>, where he writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Many readers, as well as some of my own colleagues, think it’s a depressing job. But in the past few years, I’ve become convinced that this story—the effort to understand climate change, to live with it, and to fight it—is the most thrilling tale of our time.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Robinson is one of my favorite journalists; he’s focused and organized and never condescending or cheap. Every time I read a piece of his I walk away feeling as if I’m 1% smarter and the world is more nuanced than I first assumed.</p>
<p>So go subscribe to this thing.</p>
Some Things I Have Consumed This Week2020-11-01T23:06:02Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/some-things-i-have-consumed-this-week/<ul>
<li>1 Absolute War Crime of Coffee</li>
<li>2 Inconsequential and Underwhelming Tuna Sandwiches</li>
<li>4 Hateful Amounts of Chicken</li>
<li>An Unknown Number of Tragic Bachelor Omelettes</li>
</ul>
Night Owl2020-11-01T23:01:48Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/night-owl/<p>After screaming for several months non-stop about it, my pal Lucy Bellwood has finally relented and is now starting to blog more often. <a href="https://lucybellwood.com/night-owl/">Lucy writes</a> (and this is why you should subscribe to this RSS feed immediately):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m lying in the dark, brain whirring. Too much Borges before bed.</p>
<p>There’s a dog baying at regular intervals somewhere down by the river—a canine foghorn. There are crickets, and the wash of cool night air already filing the room. I’m on the edge of going under when I hear the faintest echo of a Great Horned Owl.</p>
<p>It jolts me awake. Ears pricked. Eyes wide. After a moment’s hesitation, I climb out of bed, unlatch the window, and slip into the garden.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This reminds me that I should make a blogroll of web friends that continue to fill my RSS reader with light and magic. Even if I’ve had to shout at them about it.</p>
Accessibility is for Everyone2020-11-01T18:52:09Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/accessibility-is-for-everyone/<p>One thing I’ve noticed in video games this past year is the huge improvement they’ve made when it comes to accessibility. Crack open <a href="https://www.polygon.com/2020/7/2/21310396/last-of-us-2-accessibility-vision-difficulty-gameplay-opinions"><em>The Last of Us: Part II</em></a> or <em>Watch Dogs: Legion</em> or <a href="https://www.polygon.com/2019/9/25/20879919/gears-5-accessibility-deaf-hard-of-hearing-legally-blind-options"><em>Gears 5</em></a> and they’ll begin with a series of accessibility options that can be tweaked and improved for you and your body. These options have never been so prominent in so many games before.</p>
<p>I assume there’s a huge movement in the community in order to get games across platforms and genres and systems all to coordinate when it comes to improving this stuff. But the difference is remarkable.</p>
<p>I first noticed these options in <em>The Last of Us</em> and yet instead of just moving on and ignoring the options, I went through them one by one. And I found that they improved <em>my</em> experience of the game, too. For example: I hate having to mash buttons in games for quick time events (like being forced to tap triangle 50 times quickly so you don’t die) and I switched that so now I’d just hold the button instead. My hands are starting to feel the wear and tear of typing consistently for decades and this small improvement, intended for someone else, made my life easier, too.</p>
<p>This reminds me: years ago I sat down with an engineer and tried to convince them why we needed to make our website accessible. I tried to be convincing and political, walking calmly through why this change and that change is the kindest thing to do. But in my head I was thinking “fuck the money and the effort and every other excuse not to do this.”</p>
<p>But he fought back: “there’s no business incentive,” he cowardly squealed. “There’s so few people out there that need these accessibility options. Why should we waste our time?” Once he said this I had an out of body experience where I realized that this single question is the root cause of so many of our problems. It’s the half-baked, galaxy-brain bullshit argument of centrism: it works fine for me, so why should I care?</p>
<p>His argument implies something not just arrogant and self-centered, but something cruel and ultimately frightening. And I think it can be summarized like this: <em>Why should we be kind when we can make money being ignorant?</em></p>
<p>This is when I started to fume and I heard my high horse galloping towards me—his name is Sebastian—and with this newfound fury and power I decided to utterly destroy this arrogant prick. “Doing this work and not doing this work is the difference between being a good person and being a shitty person,” I ranted (I might have been standing on my desk at this moment with an American flag waving behind me gently in the breeze). “It is the difference between bad work and the work that we can all be proud of.”</p>
<p>Was this the best thing to say to someone to convince them of my argument? No, and it certainly wasn’t my finest moment. But instead, I now just want to point to the excellent options in <em>The Last of Us: Part II</em> because they prove that accessibility work isn’t just for a small community of customers—accessibility is for <em>everyone</em>. And just as expanding civil liberties for one group improves all of our lives collectively, the same can be said for expanding the scope of kindness in our work.</p>
<p>By making our interfaces kind for just one person, we make them kinder for us all.</p>
Cool +12020-10-26T20:34:22Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/cool-1/<p>Woh Hei Yuen is a little park in Chinatown and I’m the only one here; I’m sat at a picnic table in the dark and the cold, looking forlornly at the pagoda across from me where a cat is showing off, prowling along the very top. This whole time I’ve been watching this cat I can’t help but wonder if he’s about to give me an annoying side quest but truth be told I’m extremely anxious for other reasons that are quite beyond me.</p>
<p>It’s not like a drug deal is about to go down here in this creepy park, but it certainly feels that way right now.</p>
<p>Where the hell is she?</p>
<p>I’m trying not to look at my phone. What I want to do is look so fabulously cool that it’s upsetting. I zip up my motorcycle jacket (cool +1) as the bitter cold is turned up a notch and an icey gale blows across the city. The trees and bushes flap around me in an awkward dance. My leg is jigging uncontrollably. My heart is racing (cool -8). Time feels a bit fractured. I look around for something to lock my attention onto. Whittle out the nerves whilst I wait.</p>
<p>The moon is up there, doing its thing. It looks off-kilter and somewhat broken, a floating rock suspended in the sky, and yet it’s extravagantly bright this evening, more so than usual. Well, that 0.5 seconds of moon stuff was fun. Now I’m bored again.</p>
<p>Dammit this is one of those rare moments I wish I smoked cigarettes because 1. it would help calm my nerves and 2. I would look so cool right now, waiting for her like that. What if she walked into the park and I was sat on top of this picnic table, blowing clouds of smoke into the night air with my motorcycle jacket on, but it looked like I wasn’t waiting for her at all? That would be extremely sexy, huh?</p>
<p>Ugh what am I even thinking talking about. I’m a puddle.</p>
<p>This whole evening is about to be a disaster. A colossal fuck-up of the highest order. I’m about to meet someone I’ve never met before but...well, it’s someone I’m absolutely bonkers about already. How is that possible? Is this just out of desperation because of the pandemic? Is this because she’s funny and cool and sort of scary? Is it because I haven’t been on a date in ten months? Or is it because I already told her how I feel, and that’s the reason why we’re meeting in this freezing cold, broken-moon, cat-sidequest-ridden park?</p>
<p>Feelings are about to happen here and I know it. Ugh.</p>
<p>Because of that, there’s so many ways this evening might go sideways. It might already have gone sideways in fact, what with my anxiety barreling through my nervous system and setting off all the alarms.</p>
<p>Wait—I hear something. Boots crunching on leaves in the dark (cool +12). Well, here goes nothing.</p>
Signals2020-10-23T04:14:10Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/signals/<p>It’s so very strange when you’ve been talking to someone for 6 months and then, suddenly, from nothing but a quick look, you can <em>see</em> how they feel. You've spent so much time with them that they can’t hide anything from you; all their tells are now revealed. Language takes a back seat and you can read so much more in the quiet moments, or from their body language, or from where they put a comma more so than the words they use.</p>
<p>What does it mean when she blinks a few times in a row? What does that little smirk mean? What about that? And THAT? I would think to myself early on.</p>
<p>But now? <em>YIKES</em>. I've never talked to this person in real life before—shut up—but I have this impossibly accurate spidey sense as to how they'll react to something, and what all the signals mean.</p>
<p>And how I might help.</p>
The Future of Frontend2020-10-22T18:02:21Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-future-of-frontend/<p>Here’s a nifty event hosted by Sentry that’s all about <a href="https://futureoffrontend.splashthat.com/">the future of front-end development</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Join us on November 10th for yet another virtual event. Learn how application monitoring is more than just a failsafe for frontend development — it’s a competitive advantage that improves collaboration, code, customer happiness, and your own smug sense of self-satisfaction.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’ll be there listening to the talks and live blogging along to it.</p>
Why does this design crit hurt?2020-10-21T00:07:29Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/why-does-this-design-crit-hurt/<p>When a design crit goes south, it’s almost impossible to take all that brutal feedback and focus on course correction; going back to the interface, reviewing ten thousand comments, limping away and reassessing my approach to the problem. Instead, when I get feedback like I received earlier today, I sorta just want to mope around my apartment all day long or walk into the ocean.</p>
<p>If you want praise then being a designer is not the job for you. Because in order to do that work well you constantly have to take feedback from a network of people and then you have to ignore some things, ignore what hurts, and then get right back to it. And if you’re not getting feedback that hurts? Or what if you’re constantly getting high fives all the time? Well, either you’re the greatest designer who’s ever walked the earth or you’re working in <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/signs-of-a-toxic-workplace.html">a toxic workplace</a>.</p>
<p>My point is: when someone says “hey, this design doesn’t make sense” it’s so very difficult for that not spiral into “wow, I’m a terrible person huh!”</p>
<p>I mean, feedback is <em>always</em> personal, it’s never just about the work. When someone criticizes a design they are telling you that you didn’t think clearly, that you were impatient, that you haven’t thought about all the possibilities or understood the user properly. When someone criticizes a design they are saying that your view of the world is wrong, that it must bend towards the way they understand it.</p>
<p>But I know all this already, so why do design crits still hurt?</p>
<p>Is it my ego? Am I always so desperate for praise and for being the hero in every situation? Am I a bad designer and should I quit the field altogether?</p>
<p>Or should I just get back to work?</p>
Verifying Large Refactors2020-10-20T20:11:05Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/verifying-large-refactors/<p>I love this post from Mark Story about how he used the Sentry app <a href="https://blog.sentry.io/2020/10/20/verifying-large-refactors-in-production-with-sentry">on a big refactor</a> of Sentry itself:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Recently we used Sentry to ensure we didn’t break Sentry while doing a large refactor. When replacing an API or code path with a new implementation you’ll likely ‘deprecate’ the old path, but how do you know when that old path is finally not in use? If your code is running on a server, you could use metrics or logs, but even with them, it can be challenging to capture the required context to pinpoint where deprecated code is still in use. If your code is on the frontend logs are not an option, and you’ll need to be more creative.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Mark shows how even a simple refactor, like changing the icons of some components can be this daunting problem because it’s so hard to see <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/essays/systems-mistakes-and-the-sea">the hyperobject</a> properly; searching through a codebase for all the instances of a component can be really tough and sometimes even impossible. Welp.</p>
<p>For context, I work at Sentry too. But! I still think this kind of dogfooding is amazing and I’m constantly surprised by how we can use our own app internally to make our own app better. It’s darn impressive.</p>
People Problems2020-10-19T01:27:14Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/people-problems/<p>I wrote about <a href="https://css-tricks.com/people-problems/">how to not be a jerk</a> the other day and some of my experiences when it comes to making websites faster:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This was definitely shocking to learn when I joined a company a few years ago and found that there was a mountain of performance work that I couldn’t do alone. I started trying to teach folks about performance, as well as holding office hours and hopping onto projects and teams that needed help. But I realized that all this work didn’t help. The website I was working on in my spare time was getting <em>slower</em>, despite my best efforts.</p>
<p>Frustrated and exhausted, one day I sat back in my chair and realized that I couldn’t do all this work alone. The real problem was this: there’s no incentive for folks to care. If performance magically improved by ten thousand percent, no one in the company would have noticed. Customers would have noticed, but we all probably wouldn’t have. Except me, because I’m a nerd.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Every big problem from politics to the climate crisis, to making code better in an organization is not really a technical problem. Instead it’s always a lack of the right incentives. If people don’t care then they won’t do things, regardless of whether it’s just or right or kind. Whatever that thing might be.</p>
<p>And so to make big changes you need to focus on the incentives. I think. But also not be a jerk about it. Maybe.</p>
The least interesting thing2020-10-10T18:26:31Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-least-interesting-thing/<p>I was ranting about work the other day—what I was stressed about, how I’m not good at my job, how I feel like progress is never made—and my pal stopped me short and said “the least interesting thing about you is your job.”</p>
<p>And, well, woof.</p>
The case for rereading2020-10-10T17:47:44Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-case-for-rereading/<p>I want to quote this whole piece by Mandy Brown about <a href="https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/case-for-rereading">rereading books</a> but to avoid plagiarism I will only mention this graf:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Reread a book enough times, or often enough—keep it at hand so you can flip to dog-eared pages and marked up passages here and there—and it will eventually root itself in your mind. It becomes both a reference point and a connector, a means of gathering your knowledge and experience, drawing it all together. It becomes the material through which you engage with the world.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Well, okay, I lied—because I also want to point to this section where I began hollering aloud in my empty apartment:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Rereading packs your brain with thoughts to think with. It also makes other thoughts—like those that might flit by you in the form of various newsfeeds—less likely to be thought with. It gives you something to hold on to, something to draw back to, when everything else is in flux.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Mandy then lists some of the books that all her thoughts orbit around, those foundational thoughts-to-think. In my case that would most certainly be Ellen Ullman’s description of work in <em>Close to the Machine</em>, Harkaway’s story of the Greek financier in <em>Gnomon</em> and <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/tigerman">the success of many days</a> in <em>Tigerman</em>, along with the ghost from Ali Smith’s <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/how-to-be-both"><em>How to Be Both</em></a>. Smush all that into the <em>The Humane Interface</em> by Jef Raskin, James Baldwin’s defiance and protest in <em>The Fire Next Time</em> along with Italo Calvino’s description of <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/invisible-cities">the inferno</a> in <em>Invisible Cities</em> and you have an almost fully formed and replicatable Robin Rendle.</p>
<p>But I think there is a Solar Thought here—thoughts that resolve around a central capital T thought, that one Thing of Things, the Thought of Thoughts that you can’t ever let go. Sometimes there’s a singular, unremovable pillar buried inside that our whole personality has formed around. It’s this thought that you see every place and every book and every person by. And, for me at least, that’s PG Wodehouse; his vision of humor and England and how silliness ought to be embedded within every sentence is just pure magic.</p>
<p>I dearly wish more people read Wodehouse. If you’ve never read his work before then I apologize in advance because it will feel like getting struck by lightning. Wait!—you will most undoubtedly cry—writing can work like this? Writing can hop and dance and skip all over the place? Why does anyone write in any other way? Why did no-one tell me about this silly chap?</p>
<p>Every Wodehouse story is an excuse to tell the same story, with the same jokes in the same spot, simply rearranged. But that’s quickly forgiven because each and every sentence is like this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>You can write like this. <em>I</em> can write like this. And that’s why Wodehouse’s writing is the Thought of Thoughts, the Thing of Things for me.</p>
Good work doesn’t look good2020-10-03T17:22:10Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/good-work-doesn%E2%80%99t-look-good/<p>I don’t know how much I agree with Slava Akhmechet on <a href="https://defmacro.substack.com/p/how-to-get-promoted?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy">how to get promoted</a>, but I do think this is true:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Most good work doesn't look good. Sometimes it interferes with other people and tanks your career. But mostly it doesn't look bad either. It just doesn't look like much of anything.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>First: #designsystems. Second: I have a story to tell about my first gig in tech that I can’t for legal reasons, yet this post reminds me of how toxic and poisonous a lot of companies become. They are made up of vast bureaucracies and an overwhelming number of people that come to work each day aren’t there to do the work, not really. Or perhaps we disagree about what good work is? I’m still unsure.</p>
<p>Most tech companies work like a Communist party from the 80s; there is the infallible leader at the top, then there’s a cabal of Yes Men middle managers, then there’s the people at the bottom doing the actual work. On this note, this reminds me of reading about Chernobyl years ago and this writer mentioned that some random dude would be told to run the Department of Finance or what have you and they wouldn’t know the first thing about the work. They’d just be some asshole running this important, vital piece of government infrastructure.</p>
<p>That’s how most tech companies work, sadly.</p>
<p>At my last gig there was this other Force though, as real and as powerful as gravity. I imagined it as a ladder where everyone appeared to be ruthlessly fighting their way to the top, regardless of what it would cost them. Of course they’d smile and giggle and talk about their weekends in Tahoe, but there was this whole other thing going on in those meetings. It was subterfuge and coup after coup that I didn’t understand and was too naive to see.</p>
<p>But fuck man, I dunno. I just want to make websites.</p>
Autonomy and Hong Kong2020-10-03T17:07:12Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/autonomy/<p>Nathan Law Kwun Chung wrote this piece about <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/01/opinion/international-world/hong-kong-autonomy-china.html">the situation in Hong Kong</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A broad range of freedoms, relating to assembly, association, speech, the press, academic research, the electoral process and more, is increasingly under threat in Hong Kong. The headquarters of the most vocal pro-democracy newspaper in town was raided by 200 police officers in early August. Professors self-censor and remove certain topics from their research proposals because the content may be interpreted as breaching the new law. Protesters have been arrested for carrying flags or signs that showed allegedly unacceptable slogans.</p>
<p>Most people now refrain from expressing their political views — in person and online — because of the potential repercussions. Beijing continues to disqualify opposition candidates from running for office and invisible self-censorship bubbles beneath the surface.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Despite this slip into a totalitarian regime, the other piece of this that’s frightening is that it reminds me of a blog post I can no longer find—Robin Sloan made note of this perhaps—where someone described the Web not as a network but as a series of islands. Some of those islands are connected, but a great deal of them are not.</p>
<p>And with Hong Kong I fear this is the case now; an island being cut off from the outside world.</p>
On the design systems between us2020-10-01T22:12:06Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/on-the-design-systems-between-us/<p>Ethan Marcotte’s <a href="https://youtu.be/7bAETIw8lA0?t=985">latest talk</a> is so great and I think he captures the feeling of the whole industy/craft right now. But the part that really stuck out to me is where Ethan argued that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Creating modular components isn’t the primary goal or even the primary benefit of creating a design system. And what’s more, a focus on process and people always leads to more sustainable systems.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I tend to forget this, perhaps the most important bit of advice for starting work on a design system. It’s easy to get so lost in the details when it comes to fixing problems, so much so that the work can actually be a distraction.</p>
<p>Just last week this happened to me where I went down the rabbit hole of fixing all the Tag components in our app; making documentation, tidying up our Storybook examples, doing an audit in the app and fixing the styles. But then I realized the scope and impact of these changes. Instead of fixing these problems myself it actually made more sense that I start to make the case for a dedicated UI engineer to join our team. So I went off and wrote a doc suggesting why changing our culture and our org is so important.</p>
<p>But anyway, my point here is that focusing on the <em>process</em> and the <em>people</em> when it comes to design systems is almost always more important than focusing on the product or fixing this one tiny problem. And I feel like I need to keep relearning that.</p>
Web Apps Are Not A Thing, Please Stop2020-09-30T05:34:27Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/web-apps-are-not-a-thing-please-stop/<p>In the Bay Area there’s this very clear distinction folks make between “websites” and “web apps.” Somehow, the thinking goes, if we make a web app then we don’t need to care about accessibility or responsive design. We don’t need to care about all the work that goes into making a typical website great; semantic HTML, fast performance, responsive design.</p>
<p>“Web apps” somehow play by different unwritten rules than “websites.”</p>
<p>There’s a lot written about this subject but ultimately I think the difference between “web apps” and “websites” is complete bullshit. When you’re looking at a web app or a website you’re still using all the same technology; URLs, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The only difference is the way they’re built under the hood. Typically, “web apps” tend to use bloated JavaScript frameworks and ”websites” are written by hand by the marketing team and perhaps at most use a CMS.</p>
<p>But to people, to the browser, to the network, it’s all the same.</p>
<p>And maybe this is why people in this town are too ashamed to call themselves web designers.</p>
<p>Anyway, when building web apps I keep hearing that we don’t need to care about responsive design or accessibility and it troubles me. It’s like saying the “mobile web,” it’s an excuse to be lazy. The thinking goes in most companies that “we don’t need to care about responsive design because we’ll just build an app” but really I hear that as just another excuse to do a bad job, too.</p>
<p>Do folks know that we can make fantastic websites that are responsive now? That we can change the layout without the source order? Why has our profession become such a joke that we’re willing to hire a whole other team, build for one specific platform, when we could expand our current design and codebase to support smaller screens? Why do I assume whenever I go to a website on my phone it’s going to be an embarrassing mess? Why do I immediately copy the address, just in case I need to email it to myself to view it on a desktop browser later?</p>
<p>How did the responsive web design movement fail here?</p>
<p>I’ve been thinking about this in a different light this week since I read Mandy Brown’s <a href="https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/misfits">post the other day</a> about accessibility where she quotes Sara Hendren:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Disability in part results when the shape of the world—buildings and streets but also institutions, cultural organizations, centers of power—operates rigidly, with a brittle and scripted sense of what a body does or does not do, how it moves and organizes its world.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When I think of web apps I think of them as brittle, rigid, dumb machines; software that can’t flex to meet us here in our bodies.</p>
<p>And I reckon this is what inspired me about Ethan Marcotte’s original <a href="https://alistapart.com/article/responsive-web-design/">argument for building responsive websites</a>. Not the cool tech, or the new working philosophy, but instead that tiny act of rebellion against brittle software. Everything that goes into making a great “website” expands the scope of what we expect software to be; fast, accessible, responsive, kind.</p>
<p>But we can only do this if we stop making the distinction between “web apps” and “websites.” Only then can we start to build a Web for us all.</p>
Everything is a Story2020-09-30T04:46:20Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/everything-is-a-story/<p>I helped my quarantine pal move out of her apartment today. She’s leaving San Francisco and it was tough yada yada shut up. But as we're packing up her place, I start to make fun of her a bit. “Everything is a story, huh,” I said, pointing to a pencil that says ‘Huh’ on it. “What's the story behind this?” I point to a painting of a cat. “Or this?” I say, holding the last written note that her best friend would send her.</p>
<p>It’s strange to see so much love bundled up in boxes—in my apartment I have Cool Dark Kettle #3 from cool-dark-kettles dot com. There's no romance in the things I own and I guess I've had close friends for such a short period of time that I simply don’t have lovely-friend-things yet.</p>
<p>But my pal Ali has a warm, bubbling life of friendship both behind and ahead of her, and this empty apartment was a record of that, an archive of friendship and giggles and a reminder that I should hold onto her and never let go.</p>
Jazz Musician Lettering2020-09-24T04:49:22Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/jazz-musician-lettering/<p>Reagan Ray made a lovely collection of <a href="https://reaganray.com/2020/09/22/jazz-lettering.html">Jazz-inspired hand-lettering</a> that’s very much worth a look. There’s so many interesting styles on display here!</p>
Less homework! More fun!2020-09-22T17:39:32Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/less-homework-more-fun/<p>Newsletters often feel like having to keep up with extracurricular homework. And so a word of advice for publishing a newsletter, blog post, novel, or literally anything: keep it short and keep it sweet.</p>
<p>Writing is easy, editing is hard. And it’s important to note that a piece of writing is not somehow more important if it takes us an hour to read it. So: eff the word count! Less homework! More fun!</p>
Blot2020-09-20T23:53:20Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/blot/<p><a href="https://blot.im/">Blot</a> makes me angry. It’s so painfully simple to make tiny websites, and the video there shows just how straightforward writing on the web can be instead of the rather blotted and clunky system that I’m working with today.</p>
<p>I’m using Netlify CMS and it feels too fragile. I’m not sure if it was built for writers, it feels like it was built for engineers instead who don’t do much writing. But I want a CMS that I can live inside of everyday. One that doesn’t randomly lose content, one that I can publish short missives from my phone. Or better yet: no CMS at all. One where I can just write things in my text editor, mash the save button and the deploy handles itself. No hassle, no faff.</p>
<p>(Editor’s note: I love the team at Netlify and everything they’re working on, but the CMS certainly feels like it doesn’t get enough attention.)</p>
<p>So perhaps I should spend next weekend throwing everything away and start again. I want the act of writing to be the hardest part of blogging, not the process.</p>
Organizing as a Machine2020-09-20T17:35:43Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/organizing-as-a-machine/<p>Robin Marty was interviewed by Bridget Read about the potential of <a href="https://www.thecut.com/2020/09/ruth-bader-ginsburg-roe-v-wade-overturned-what-to-do.html">losing <em>Roe v. Wade</em></a> and how we can fight it. But this part here is what caught my attention:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Reproductive rights are never going to be a priority. Never look at federal elections as something that’s going to save us. [...] It’s all about local power. One of the things that happened in 2009 that still upsets me is that we had built an entire grassroots state-by-state movement to get Obama elected into the White House and to get electoral change at the federal level. And as soon as everybody was seated, as soon as that election was over, it all got dismantled. It all got trashed. It was like, okay, the work is done, we can go home now. And everybody took away their resources and all of these groups were left floundering. They died.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is something that Obama talks about in his book <em>Dreams of My Father</em>, written before he became president, where he argued that building a political movement is like building a machine. It’s this vast infrastructure and database, these connections between people. But if we’re not paying enough attention then all of that can fall apart so very quickly.</p>
<p>Also this morning I’m slowly reading John Lewis’s autobiography and that’s precisely how he describes the Civil Rights movement in the 60’s; <em>organizing as a machine</em>. The pamphlet-making, the lunch-making, pulling out chairs for a sermon, calling people, going to meetings. It requires painstaking discipline and nerve.</p>
<p>And maintaining that machine is so often boring.</p>
<p>The most important parts of the Civil Rights movement, it seems to me, were these small acts of bravery then. Not just those famous moments, those pictures of courage. People back then realized what we’re relearning now: that we have a responsibility to build that machine and then to continuously maintain it. It’s not enough to retweet a thing here, retweet a thing there. Or even to just elect Biden this year. This is the most important election of our lifetime, but once #45 is discarded like the useless bag of mulch that he is, we still have so much work left ahead of us.</p>
<p>The machine must be built and then it must be maintained.</p>
<p>I see a lot of anger about 2020 being a terrible year, evidence that we live in the worst timeline, and that worries me a great deal. Because once we’re out of the worst timeline we have to focus on it staying that way. For example: today I can open my porch windows and breathe fresh air for the first time in weeks. But that doesn’t mean the problem has gone away. The Climate Crisis is still a problem, whether I’m experiencing it or not.</p>
<p>So being a good citizen of this Republic, I realize now, is about making sustained contributions to that great machine; making sure it’s funded and well-oiled, making sure that the people at the front of the line can take a break for a minute.</p>
<p>Smaller acts of courage but constant and unending, unwavering.</p>
RBG2020-09-19T18:48:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/rbg/<p>We were making jokes in my kitchen when we heard the news. We saw the news roll in, gasped as we saw the back and forth on Twitter. We watched the outpouring of love begin, as Vote Save America <a href="https://votesaveamerica.com/getmitch">raised more than $10 million</a> in just a few hours, and as everyone panicked trying understand the scope of this change and what it means for us all.</p>
<p>This morning I’m watching <em>RBG</em> for the first time and in a clip from an interview on <em>60 Minutes</em>, Justice Ginsberg asks a simple question: in 1776 who are “We the People”? And, after a beat: “I would not be included,” she says.</p>
<p>I’ve never thought about that before, about how there are those like Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who see the Constitution as this fount of optimism despite sexism and racism, pure injustice, being underlined in plain English. Despite that, because of that injustice in fact, Justice Ginsberg saw the Constitution as a document designed to be improved, always half-finished. How “We the People” must be expanded until everyone, and in equal measure, is included under that umbrella. She saw the way in which government could be a source for good, although at the same time being this vast and broken system. But!—crucially—one that’s possible to change.</p>
<p>Justice Ginsberg was a testament to that optimism, that single-minded focus and all-consuming attention that vast change requires. “Fight for the things you care about...” Ginsberg once said “...but do it in a way that that will lead others to join you.”</p>
<p>And so watching <em>RBG</em> this morning I realize that being optimistic or hopeful is not the same as being naive.</p>
Don’t Be A Hero2020-09-18T18:48:42Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/don%E2%80%99t-be-a-hero/<p>When it comes to design and development I always try to be the hero. I rush into the fray, don’t really understand the problem clearly, and end up trying to reinvent the wheel. But all this leads to is frustration and deadends.</p>
<p>When doing front-end stuff this happens when I make giant CSS refactors, where I hope to catapult us into a utopian world without Bootstrap. 1000+ line pull requests that are basically impossible to review, test, and find any regressions in. Being the hero here doesn’t just end up wasting my time when those PRs don’t ship, but they also waste all the time of the people around me.</p>
<p>Having that utopian vision of the world is important though. And being optimistic about making enormous change is important, too. But I’m learning that the truly wise folks hold that vision in their minds whilst making tiny incremental progress in that direction every single day. Tiny steps is how you solve everything; from a bad design, to a confusing codebase, to a dysfunctional society.</p>
<p>We cannot fix everything today. And being a rebel, being the hero, is short-lived and attention seeking. But if we quietly make this one small change today then we can begin to push everything in the right direction.</p>
Huh2020-09-17T16:15:19Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/huh/<p>Here’s a weird bug. The other day I shipped a toggle that sits in the top right of the nav that lets you change the theme of this here website. I want to eventually copy what <a href="https://adactio.com/">Jeremy’s built</a> on his website where there’s all sorts of buck wild designs you can choose from.</p>
<p>But! This little toggler chap today is breaking the layout on smaller screens. The whole nav is using flexbox with <code>overflow: hidden</code> but yet somehow it <em>still</em> breaks the layout. This might be a small bug but I spent 30mins the other day trying to debug it and yet still came up short.</p>
<p>I can’t remember the last time I tried to figure out a bug and I was so thoroughly stumped. Is this a problem with flexbox? Am I not hiding the overflow of the right container? Is this some other problem with the width of the togglers? I have absolutely no idea. Huh.</p>
Retweet but do not read2020-09-13T19:12:06Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-message-box/<p>For the last couple of months I’ve wondered why there isn’t a CSS-Tricks for politics. Why does every conversation about this subject stress me the fuck out and why can’t I find a place that is hopeful and consistent but isn’t just offering half-baked rants or click-bait trash? Is there a place to learn about politics without giving me a heart attack in the process?</p>
<p>Because I think all the major news orgs fail gloriously on this front. They have great stuff, yes. Lots of swell writers doing important work. But you have to wade through endless garbage and arm-chair opinions with no real political expertise. The great writers get lost in all that noise.</p>
<p>I think it’s because most writing is designed to be retweeted, but not to be read.</p>
<p>This reminds me: not so long ago I saw a technical post on a startup’s blog about how to create a 3D map but instead of talking about what they built or giving a brief intro, the writer instead began with the sort of Big Romantic Introduction like “Maps have always been important to the human species because...” And, woof. This is also why I can’t watch a lot of talks about design, too. A few years ago I went to a conference in New York about type and every single talk began with a 15 minute breakdown of the person’s career. There was so much fluff, so much useless intro. <em>Tell me a story!</em> Give me some drama! I don’t care that you worked at Nike, christ alive.</p>
<p>I think this is why I adore CSS-Tricks / Chris Coyier-esque posts (I know I write there but I can still appreciate what everyone else does despite me slowly taking it down from the inside). There’s no faffing about, and each post just dives straight into the fray. <em>Over the weekend I was messing about with X and here’s what I built...</em> It’s so much more approachable and there’s no ego involved. Technology X is not a stepping stone to some utopian vision of the world.</p>
<p>It’s more like: <em>Look, I made a thing!</em></p>
<p>This is what I want from political writing, too. No harbinger of death stuff, no Big Romantic Introduction, and no click-bait crap. I want to read something that can teach me more about the political system over here without encouraging me to hop off a bridge.</p>
<p>So after months of searching for this sort of thing I found Dan Pfeiffer’s <a href="https://messagebox.substack.com/about">The Message Box</a>. And I think it definitely sits somewhere on the Coyier Spectrum of Writing, in that there’s no fluff or dancing around a subject. Pfeiffer clearly thinks about each topic for a dang long time before putting pen to paper and there’s no ego I can detect. Each post is more like: <em>This is how I am currently thinking about this situation</em>. And goddamn that is so refreshing to me.</p>
<p>I also finished his book <em>Yes We (Still) Can</em> the other day and it recounts his journey from the ‘08 Obama campaign through to his work in the White House. I’d highly recommend it because there’s a lot to learn in there about how to deal with the current climate, how to think about the political challenges we’re dealing with right now.</p>
<p>And why we should be cautiously optimistic, too.</p>
Fighting with a Smile2020-09-12T01:36:51Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-failure-of-many-days/<p>The next 53 days are the most important of our lives. For the pandemic, for civil rights, for ending the fillibuster and fighting the climate crisis, for sane gun control, for providing universal health care to everyone, for tax reform, and for so many other vital issues. However, the only way we can tackle these problems is if we flip the ballot; from the White House all the way down to the rural Senate races across the country.</p>
<p>And to do <em>that</em> we need to avoid cynicism like hell.</p>
<p>Maciej Cegłowski had a great piece about <a href="https://idlewords.com/2020/09/effective_political_giving.htm">how to give money</a> to political campaigns the other day, where he writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If you think the most important goal in 2020 is to put Biden and Harris in the White House, then limit your giving to the dozen states where that election will be decided: Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio and the second districts of Nebraska and Maine (where the electoral vote is split). Treat events in the remaining states as political theater designed for media consumption in the swing states. You don’t have to like this system, but recognize that it’s a political fact of life until we elect people to change it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Maciej runs <a href="https://techsolidarity.org/resources/great_slate.html">The Great Slate</a> which is an effort to flip the Senate in 2020 by giving money to rural campaigns that don’t get much attention. <a href="https://secure.actblue.com/donate/great_slate">Maciej continues</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Why fund these House races to win the Senate? Because Senate campaigns are saturated with money, and can't usefully spend more! They're also not allowed to give it to other campaigns.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, rural House candidates can run a complementary strategy: doing small-scale voter outreach, campaigning on local issues that cut across party lines, and building on field and campaign infrastructure built in 2018.</p>
<p>Every donation means less time on the phones for these candidates, and more time campaigning. In a year when we can't take any votes for granted, they will be doing the hardest work—persuading voters, one at a time, that real change can happen in America, and that rural communities are not going to be left behind.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This sort of optimism is extremely rare. And before our own natural political cynicism kicks in—yes, I get it, 2020 is a lot. But this year is not a randomly bad year for us all. This isn’t bad luck.</p>
<p>2020 is what we get when the whole country is forced to reconcile a debt it’s ignored. The orange-black smoke that descended this week on the Bay Area and the fires happening everywhere across the West, to the Black Lives Matter movement, to the pandemic still raging in our cities. This is the result of years of cruelty—cruelty stacked on top of cruelty—that is biting us in the ass today.</p>
<p>So 2020 is not just a bad year, it’s the failure of many days. And within the next 53 we get to fix that, if we’re smart.</p>
<p><a href="https://youtu.be/Wy8iiC2Mqso">The damage</a> will take the rest of our lives to undo, yes. Cynicism is likely to kick in again during the moments where we most need quiet heroism and faith in political change. But we don’t have any more time to lament this year, we don’t have the resources to say “fuck 2020” or sigh that “this year is an eternity” or “wow this is the darkest timeline.” Because in these next 53 days we get to turn this ship around. We get to skip, hop, and jump into the right goddamn timeline.</p>
<p>We just have to hold onto that cautious child-like optimism and vote like our lives depend on it. Because they really do.</p>
<p>Sadly this year I can’t vote, I can’t even donate because I don’t have a green card. The only thing I can do is blog my ass off about this. But one thing I do know is that if you’re thinking about making a donation it’s smart to do that today because it’ll give these campaigns a massive strategic advantage. They can plan their ad spending and how they communicate with folks still on the fence. And some random Senate race in some random state might not sound important but if there’s one thing that 2020 has taught is it’s that everything matters. Every name on the ballot, every race, every time we turn up.</p>
<p>And panic donating four days before the election will help no-one.</p>
<p>So! We need optimism. We need <a href="https://secure.actblue.com/donate/great_slate">to donate</a>. And then <a href="https://votesaveamerica.com/">we need to vote</a>. Because there’s eight weekends left to save the world. I know that sounds dumb and extremist because we’ve been told that the two parties are the same and that politics is broken—but!—that’s the cynicism we need to avoid if we want to fix things.</p>
<p>We can only win with each gruelling, hard-earned vote at a time. And we must fight for every single one of them. But we can do that with a smile, with a boundless optimism because we know that this is the right moment, the right cause, for the right people.</p>
<p>53 days of optimism. Of hope. That’s what we need; to fight with a smile.</p>
Design Vlogs2020-09-09T16:20:17Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/design-vlogs/<p>The pandemic has made a lot of things harder and so instead of setting up big meetings full of people to discuss design ideas, what I’m trying this week is something new: design vlogs.</p>
<p>I’ve been making videos of myself talking through a problem, giving all the necessary context, and then showing the design I want to pitch to the team. With the help of <a href="https://www.mmhmm.app/">mmhmm</a>, I can record sketches from my iPad, switch to my desktop’s version of Figma with a click and then walk through the hi-fi mockups. It’s a great setup and for the first time in a long while I feel like I’m doing the <em>design</em> part of design and not just worrying about visual niceties.</p>
<p>I hope that these videos will help people manage their time better and so they don’t have to drop everything for this one big meeting. They can grab lunch whilst listening to me rant or even treat it like a podcast.</p>
<p>But also this is an archive of everything I’m working on and what I’m thinking about at the moment. We’ll see if it helps my team get on the same page but I reckon it’s going to be wonderful to be able to go back and say “ah, yes. I had this all wrong. And this is the moment I realized...”</p>
Pop Music / False B-Sides II2020-09-07T06:23:38Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/pop-music-false-b-sides-ii/<p>Baths released a new album called <em>Pop Music / False B-Sides II</em> and I’ve been listening to it non-stop this week. My favorite song at the moment is <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/4VQPuTO98JrKBvcsj60izm?si=WGAQCVWQS3uiXhlhQdtfFQ">Sex</a> because the moment I hit play it drags me screaming back to my college dorm when I listened to Baths for the very first time.</p>
<p>I find myself today in a similar place as I was back then; stuck in place, reminiscing about everything with enormous doses of nostalgia, my life held on pause with endless waiting, alone but almost, maybe, intermittently happy. Baths nails that feeling, of being happy sad, saddily happy, joyously miserable.</p>
The Money-Bail System is Racist2020-09-06T01:53:22Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-money-bail-system-is-racist/<p>Clint Smith writes about the overwhelming tragedy that is the money-bail system here in America, where defendants are required to pay money in order to get out of jail before their trial takes place. These are innocent people treated as if they’re guilty simply because they’re poor.</p>
<p>Smith begins his piece with <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/02/clint-smith-freedom-aint-free/552506/">the bail of Martin Luther King Jr.</a> in 1963 and what’s changed since:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[...] the number of people sitting in jail has skyrocketed. Of the approximately 630,000 people held in more than 3,000 local jails across the United States, 70 percent are awaiting trial and therefore are legally innocent, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. The Vera Institute of Justice reports that black Americans are jailed at nearly four times the rate of white Americans.</p>
<p>Being in jail and unable to post bond can create instability in somebody’s life. Research suggests that spending as few as two days in jail can damage a person’s physical and economic well-being and increase the likelihood of cycling back into the criminal-justice system.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When the BLM marches started earlier this summer, so many people started sharing links to community bail funds. But what are they and how do they work? Clint continues:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Community bail funds work by pooling donations to spring from jail people who cannot afford to pay their way out. Once a fund has posted bail, an individual is free to go home, with the expectation that he will stay out of trouble and appear in court on a scheduled date. After the defendant shows up and the case is resolved, the bail money is returned to the community fund, to be used for another defendant.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Organizations like <a href="https://brooklynbailfund.org/">the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund</a> are a truly wonderful thing, but they fall short of the end goal here: the complete dismantling of this racist money-bail system.</p>
<p>So how do we go about getting rid of it? Well, voting for Biden. His public policy on criminal justice reform makes it clear that <a href="https://joebiden.com/justice/">they despise it</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Cash bail is the modern-day debtors’ prison. The cash bail system incarcerates people who are presumed innocent. And, it disproportionately harms low-income individuals. Biden will lead a national effort to end cash bail and reform our pretrial system by putting in place, instead, a system that is fair and does not inject further discrimination or bias into the process.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If we want to break up this vast racist infrastructure, then voting for Biden is the very first step.</p>
Subnautica2020-09-05T18:03:26Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/subnautica/<p>It begins with a crash; spiraling, hurtling, spinning, dragged in every direction at once. From inside the escape pod you look up and see through the small window at the top, back at the battleship, just at the very moment where it explodes into a million fragments. You brace yourself for the shockwave but it rattles the pod so violently that pieces of it tear off and start flying about. You watch one chunk of metal bounce off the walls like a tennis ball until it’s the last thing you remember.</p>
<p>And then? You wake up. Surrounded by miles of absolute nothing, stranded in your tiny escape pod, for as far as you can see; ocean, ocean, and endless miles of big dumb ocean.</p>
<p>Well, except for the battleship you ejected from—500 meters away it’s half submerged with flames licking the side of the hull. Enormous pieces of the ship are still crashing down around you, and to top it all off your AI companion dryly warns you that in about 2 hours the ship will explode once again, sending radioactive debris every which way, and poisoning the landscape for millions of years to come.</p>
<p>Welcome to the nightmare-stress and Waterworld-inspired survival videogame of Subnautica.</p>
<p>But the stress of this game isn’t so much in the survival as it is in the day to day minutiae of doing small things. You must explore the world, whilst learning what took down your ship, whilst hunting fish and managing your hunger, not to mention making sure that you’re searching for water in an ocean of salty poison, and also taking care to find the materials you need to craft a better suit (one that can withstand a small nuclear explosion before your ship goes AWOL).</p>
<p>And for some reason I am ranting to my therapist about all this, about Subnautica.</p>
<p>“There’s something about this game I adore but I find hard to describe,” I tell him. “I think it’s because Subnautica isn’t a sci-fi game. It’s not really about the future. It’s teaching you about the value of doing all the smallest things that aren’t important; doing the dishes, cutting your hair, calling friends, exercising. All those things aren’t how we measure success—we only think of the big things like falling in love, finding a great job, making a beautiful thing. But cleaning the dishes and doing laundry is what really stands in the way of the big things and us.”</p>
<p>My therapist began nodding his head violently up and down. Which, um, <em>rude</em>.</p>
<p>I ignore him and continue: “Subnautica is great because most games and movies are about saving the world and doing all the big stuff.” I am flailing my arms all over the place at this point in the rant. “They tend to forget that life is tedious. Most of our lives are repetitively doing all that boring maintenance. And I struggle with this. I struggle watching the dials and doing the dishes, I do not fold the clothes, and make sure that I’m doing okay. But lately I’ve been trying a bit harder when it comes to the smallest things. I moved my desk into a better spot, I tidied my bedroom, I did the laundry. I cooked, cleaned, and called a friend. Small things.”</p>
<p>“Yes,” he replied. “Sometimes we just need to take the trash out. The world can wait for now.”</p>
The Phone of the Wind2020-09-04T16:13:19Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-phone-of-the-wind/<p><a href="https://allthatsinteresting.com/phone-of-the-wind">Krissy Howard</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In 2011, a 9.0-magnitude earthquake tore through northeastern Japan and triggered a devastating tsunami. Together, the events destroyed the country, causing more than $300 billion in damages and resulting in the loss of more than 15,000 residents. Some survivors are still grieving over the loss of their loved ones, and one coastal town has come up with a unique way of coping.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Positioned atop a grassy hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, a phone booth in Otsuchi, Japan allows living people to call their dead relatives and loved ones. Called the “phone of the wind,” the disconnected rotary phone positioned inside a glass booth allows callers to send verbal messages to those they’ve lost, which the wind then carries away.</p>
</blockquote>
Risk2020-09-04T16:02:24Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/risk/<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/28/opinion/coronavirus-schools-tradeoffs.html">Aaron E. Carroll</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Too many view protective measures as all or nothing: Either we do everything, or we might as well do none. That’s wrong. Instead, we need to see that all our behavior adds up.</p>
<p>Each decision we make to reduce risk helps. Each time we wear a mask, we’re throwing some safety on the pile. Each time we socialize outside instead of inside, we’re throwing some safety on the pile. Each time we stay six feet away instead of sitting closer together, we’re throwing some safety on the pile. Each time we wash our hands, eat apart and don’t spend time in large gatherings of people, we’re adding to the pile.</p>
</blockquote>
Foghorn2020-09-02T16:12:51Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/foghorn/<p>I find myself longing for something new. When it comes to writing, I mean, and I’m not sure what that might be. For the past year I’ve been beating the same drum—there’s no progress, no sense of momentum or drive in the work. I look back on everything I’ve written and, well, I’m not impressed with myself. It’s not <em>exciting</em>.</p>
<p>At first I assumed this was a problem with my own enthusiasm and something that required buckets of therapy, perhaps the writing hadn’t changed at all and it was just my own nerve for it. But now I think I need to shake things up. I need a new format, a new medium. Something that will blow off the cobwebs.</p>
<p>The other day I sat down with all the text I had gathered from <em>Volume A</em> and tried to force myself into the <em>Adventures</em> mood; the one where I’m excited and typing at lightning speed and coffee is rushing through my veins. But after an hour of trying to force that kind of enthusiasm I realized that this just isn’t working. No, it doesn’t feel right. There’s something shameful about the work, something that doesn’t quite meet the moment. It’s lacking research. It has no sense of a journey or a story connecting all the disparate parts together.</p>
<p>It doesn’t feel punk rock.</p>
<p>I’ve always struggled with that, as I’m sure everyone does; trying to figure out what’s successful and what’s a flop. I used to measure it in retweets or hearts or follows, and then something I’d written in ten minutes would explode and I’d sigh. I could do so much better!</p>
<p>And then there’d be the flops. The quiet chunks of work from years ago that no one has ever read and that I still think about often. I remember that work like <a href="https://youtu.be/iHCmzvzCmhI">a foghorn</a> wailing from some far off distance, warning me of cliffs and shallow tide.</p>
<p>That sound reminds me how I want all these words to click-clack together. Retweets and likes be damned.</p>
Don’t draw the UI, draw the priority2020-09-02T15:23:35Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/don%E2%80%99t-draw-the-ui-draw-the-priority/<p>Someone gave me some great feedback in the moments when I’m struggling with a design: “Don’t draw the UI, draw the priority instead.”</p>
<p>What they meant by this is that I should go away and write a humble list of priorities for every project: most important info at the top -> least important info at the bottom. So instead of trying to figure out the order of the information in a component—like a card or a table or what have you, we should use this content audit to help define the visual priority of each bit.</p>
<p>Here’s an example if we were to redesign a subscription page:</p>
<hr />
<ul>
<li>Price (most important thing)</li>
<li>Title of Plan</li>
<li>Description of Plan</li>
<li>Comparison of Current vs. Selected Plan</li>
<li>Reviews/testimonials (least important thing)</li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p>It’s just a written list, nothing fancy. But this is the work of design just as much as making gradients and picking fonts or drawing things.</p>
<p>Arguing about the priority of this list is a great place to start because folks will tend to disagree with what’s the most important thing. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that the most important thing should be at the top of the page, but perhaps it should be bold or red or typographically more prominent. That’s a whole separate argument and when you show people that debate will always get muddled—this list of priorities is a way to focus the attention on the problem, not the styles.</p>
<p>In other words, the priorities should guide the pixels and not the other way around.</p>
The Right Number2020-09-02T15:19:47Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-right-number/<p>My pal Lucy Bellwood just launched <a href="https://therightnumber.tel/">a new project</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Right Number is a gentle, noncommercial space where your only job is to be yourself. Upon dialing you’ll be connected to a voicemail box and given a brief prompt. You have three minutes to answer however you’d like.</p>
<p>The Right Number is also an experiment. Future prompts may take different forms or branch out into other types of media. Things could change at any time. That’s life for you.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I helped build the site but the striking design and buck wild typographic choices are all the work of Lucy’s ever-so-lovely style. And I think it was a cool project for a bunch of reasons; we wrote everything in plain ol’ HTML and CSS, working together on the phone and using Codepen, then Lucy dragged the exported folder into Netlify and BOOM! A website was born.</p>
<p>Side note: I wish Codepen was the editor <em>and</em> the place you could deploy the website though. Like, here’s a pen, give it a fancy domain name, and then hit deploy. Maybe an integration with Netlify or something.</p>
<p>Anyway, websites and friendship is cool.</p>
The Thing with Leading in CSS2020-08-29T04:53:52Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-thing-with-leading-in-css/<p>Matthias Ott has made some notes about the upcoming <a href="https://matthiasott.com/notes/the-thing-with-leading-in-css">leading-trim CSS property</a> which is the best intro I’ve read of this thing so far:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The spacing between individual elements of a website and, in particular, the vertical spacing, has been a regular matter of debate between web designers and developers. Designers insist that what they see in the browser doesn’t look at all like the layout they originally designed. Developers respond that all the margins in the style sheets exactly match the margins in the layout. So who is right? The tricky thing is: In a way, they are both right.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This CSS property hasn’t landed in browsers yet—right now it’s just a spec—but it does solve a real problem that I’ve simply gotten used to: spacing blocks of text on the web is either impossible, annoying, or requires tons of hacks to make it mathematically correct. To this day I don’t really care about pixel perfect interfaces—I’ll eye things up and if they look okay then I sort of don’t care about the math.</p>
<p><code>leading-trim</code> takes all of the guesswork and eyeballing out of it by letting you take out the space within the letters themselves, so thaat now it’s possible to accurately align two bits of text together on the web. It doesn’t sound like a big deal but I sort of reckon it could become something like <code>box-sizing: border-box;</code>. We use it all the time, and so frequently, that we forget it’s not the default in browsers.</p>
<p>The other day <a href="http://robinsloan.com/">Robin</a> mentioned that CSS has now gathered this massive collection of tools into this big beautiful thing, and I would most certainly agree. CSS is actually, yes, awesome now. Over the past 5-10 years styling things has <em>exponentially</em> improved. And not just with tacked-on features, but the whole infrastructure underlying the language; the foundations of CSS itself. So much so that the way we think about CSS must change with these improvements.</p>
<p>I’ve mentioned this before somewhere but years ago I was talking to a fantastic web developer whose work I admired a great deal and they didn’t know what a clearfix was. Flexbox had existed for such a long time that they hadn’t need to learn about floats or clearfixes or any of the bonkers stuff tied to laying out websites in that way.</p>
<p>And <code>leading-trim</code>? Well, it contributes to that future where everything I know is sort of irrelevant. But in a good way!</p>
The Radium Craze2020-08-29T04:38:33Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-radium-craze/<p>Eric Bailey on <a href="https://ericwbailey.design/writing/the-radium-craze.html">the radium craze</a> and the harmful effects of applying one technology to everything:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Blanket-applying radium to everything created horrific outcomes, some that we’re still being affected by today. Bottles of radium-infused beverages still show up in antique stores with some frequency. If they’re recognized as such, specialized containment and cleanup crews are brought in.</p>
<p>This being said, radium has some positive applications. Contemporary uses include treating some forms of cancer, checking machined metal parts for defects, and sourcing neutrons. These are situations where radium’s properties are purposefully and deliberately applied.</p>
<p>[...] Technology drives outcomes, but its selection doesn’t live in a vacuum. As technology workers, we have a responsibility to make careful and deliberate technology choices and not cause undue immediate or long-term harm.</p>
</blockquote>
Signs of a Toxic Workplace2020-08-27T16:03:06Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/signs-of-a-toxic-workplace/<ul>
<li>The first thought you have about your company is “ugh.”</li>
<li>You constantly have to explain what your job is.</li>
<li>You make receipts of all the work you’re doing.</li>
<li>Everything is an argument, and not the healthy kind.</li>
<li>There are too many meetings.</li>
<li>You feel smarter than your boss.</li>
</ul>
A Rocket-Powered Jumbo Jet2020-08-26T23:09:14Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/a-rocket-powered-jumbo-jet/<p>I was about to get my ass kicked. The design critique had barely started and yet I knew that my designs weren’t good enough; I watched as my mentor’s eyes narrowed and then focused into a point the same way that a hawk scans a field from three miles away.</p>
<p>My work was the rabbit and I had made a terrible mistake.</p>
<p>As the feedback unrolled and intensified, each part of my design was torn to pieces and it dawned on me just how much I had half-assed this project. I melted in my chair and whilst I was slumping towards the ground, my pal John took a screenshot as my spirit left my body.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/face-palm.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>In my defense, I’m not making this expression because I hate criticism. I’m becoming a goo monster here because I could see all the holes in my logic and it was thoroughly embarrassing. Anyone having their work trashed in a public space will be made uncomfortable by it but half my job as a designer should be to think clearly, to step through a problem with unwavering logic and attention. Designers ought to be able to see problems, eloquently give the necessary context, form simple solutions, and to make a damn fine argument about why this is the best way forward.</p>
<p>And, well, my argument was extremely bad.</p>
<p>As the Great Slumping began I realized I had made the rookiest of mistakes by spending too much time moving pixels about in Figma. Things sure looked pretty, but they didn’t make sense. And I could now see from the hawk’s perspective: I had to admit in a room full of people that I hadn’t understood the problem correctly, that the UI was weak because my thoughts weren’t clear enough.</p>
<p>“None of this makes sense,” my mentor sighed.</p>
<p>Now usually when giving feedback to other people, my mentor is somewhat reserved and nice but with me she lets it fly because we trust each other. It can hurt an awful lot disappointing her, yes. But it’s important for me to grasp what she sees and this form of bluntness is the fastest way for us to get there. This feedback is probably what most people would consider to be hell itself—the absolute opposite of nice—but strangely enough I find it to be overwhelmingly kind. To be this blunt with someone and know that it won’t hurt their ego, this kind of feedback is a blessing.</p>
<p>A form of respect.</p>
<hr />
<p>The misstep I had made is a common one, and a lesson I must learn over and over again. I had forgotten that there are two modes of design, just as there is in writing.</p>
<p>The first mode is understanding the problem, getting a ten-thousand foot view of the land. It’s getting people to acknowledge that this really <em>is</em> the problem we need to agree upon. This work needs to happen in a sketchbook in the form of messy, back-of-the-napkin drawings or in writing. All this helps you to form a proper argument and focus your thoughts.</p>
<p>The second mode of design is taking that ten-thousand foot view and zooming all the way in to the hairs on the back of the rabbit; figuring out the precise UI and components, the copywriting, the animations, the everything else. This should be done in a design tool like Figma or Sketch. And this is when we should be talking about color palettes, icons, design systems, and consistency.</p>
<p>The problem with almost all design work is that first phase never really happens. People don’t take that ten thousand foot view of the problem and are focusing instead on the pixels; they’re trapped by the system they know too well.</p>
<p>Junior designers (like me) tend to forget that when you’re thinking about UX you should ignore the design tools. Figma and Sketch are useless in the first mode of design because you can spend hours in those pixel-perfect design tools aligning tables and futzing with icons, worrying about the leading and spacing and margins between things, without understanding the actual problem.</p>
<p>But the pixels do not matter. Not yet.</p>
<p>Instead we must learn to sketch, we must draft and draft and draft again until it hurts. We must then show engineers and product managers those ugly drafts, too. We must think about the problem from every angle, and we must avoid being precious with our work.</p>
<p>I think people get stuck in that second mode because productivity in design is often tied to “how many pages or frames did I design today?” when productivity should instead be thought of as “how did my understanding of the problem change?” Does your brain hurt from thinking and being confused and talking about the problem, or asking endless questions about it?</p>
<p>That’s the sign of true progress, as much as it might hurt.</p>
<hr />
<p>So this is the pickle I found myself in the other day. I suddenly realized that the tools I had been using were forming my thoughts, trapping me in a certain mode of thinking. The physical keyboard, and Figma, and knowing too much about the code, everything had been pushing me down a certain path that I couldn’t avoid.</p>
<p>So the tools had to go.</p>
<p>Sketching was the solution and showing people those nasty little drawings. I needed folks to review them first, before I head into production-level mockups where I tend to get distracted by the UI. This way I expected to save tons of time moving borders and boxes around and hopefully people would give more honest feedback because they can see that all of this is temporary. At any moment we can change things with a sketch.</p>
<p>How do you go about sketching like this though? Well, after looking around at the tools out there I went ahead and did the most boring thing imaginable; I ordered the big iPad Pro, the Apple Pencil, and the Magic Keyboard.</p>
<p>I exhaled aloud as I bought the thing. How excruciatingly <em>boring</em>.</p>
<p>I’m not an artist and cannot draw to save my life but perhaps this would help though. I would get this thing and it’d just be another iPad, another big dumb expensive tool that could support my work and help me escape that second mode of design. It’d be fine, but I knew for a fact that it wouldn’t be anything special.</p>
<p>But shortly after it arrived, I found myself...lost.</p>
<p>I was entirely, thoroughly, exponentially <em>woo’d</em>. After a few hours using this device—switching from sketching to typing to tapping on the screen—I realized that this is the most exciting computer I’ve used in more than decade. Perhaps since the Kindle? After two short days of using this thing full time, all my opinions flipped upside down and inside out. And I know this is turning into a clickbait post about <em>How X is the Future of Y</em> but I truly do believe now that this is how design should be done. Laptops are simply the wrong tool for the job. They help with production but they do not help with understanding problems.</p>
<p>Let me explain.</p>
<p>First off I downloaded <a href="https://paper.bywetransfer.com/">Paper</a>, a sketching app that I had used years ago. It’s formed around the idea of Journals and within each of them I realized I could treat them like a sketchbook. I could brainstorm first and write notes. I could combine it with Safari to take screenshots from the Sentry app, throw them into a Journal, and then make messy designs on top of them.</p>
<p>The reason why Paper is so damn good is because it’s not a sketching app though. It’s secretly another kind of app altogether...</p>
<p>I realized that half my problem when it comes to design is that I’m terrible at giving context. In design crits I can’t seem to find the right words—why did I do this, why does it help? But I avoided making formal presentations because those absolutely suck and exporting things from Figma into Google Slides is exhausting and a lot of dumb, stupid work.</p>
<p>But—then it struck me—what if I treated Paper like an essay or, better yet, like a keynote?</p>
<p>After braintstorming ideas, I would slowly morph each idea into a slide with a single bit of information that I could then share with folks during design crit. After organizing things in this way I found that Paper is the best slidedeck app I’ve ever used. I could share the screen of my iPad and flip forward between the pages of the Journal as I go, jotting down feedback or notes on the slide itself. Each slidedeck is a sketchbook, every journal contains the problem, the context, and eventually the very rough solution that I want us all to talk about. And at no point in this process have I touched a laptop.</p>
<p>This reminds me that at the beginning of the quarantine I was playing a DnD-like game with Jez and he was the Dungeon Master. He shared his screen to show our crew a map that he had drawn and with each new development in the fight or the story he would show where each of us stood and where the enemies were, and it suddenly made the world so much more real.</p>
<p>I wanted to do the same for my designs. To share the screen on the iPad you can plug it into your Mac and open up Quicktime > <code>Create a New Movie</code>. From here you can select the iPad as the source and then share your screen with any video app like Google Meet or Zoom. It is absolutely remarkable and I’m upset I didn’t think of this sooner. Flipping through a notebook in a design crit is the way this should work.</p>
<p>Also, side note, the tools in the Paper app are <em>perfect</em> for making quick wireframes for things, too. There’s one tool which fills in color and it is <em>magic</em> and genuinely ingenious.</p>
<p>Also also: being able to draw well with Paper is not really the point. You don’t need to be able to draw to be a designer, you just need to be willing to think about problems intensely. Look, I will prove it. Examine this absolute crap design I made earlier:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/issues.png" alt="A bad drawing in the Paper app for the iPad Pro" /></p>
<p>Is it beautiful? No. Can I draw a straight line to save my life? Also no. Does this look like a sketch you’d find on the back of a toilet stall? Absolutely yes.</p>
<p>But that’s not the point! <em>In search of great design we must forego being pretty for being understood</em>. And this setup—the pencil, the iPad Pro, the Paper app, and the Magic Keyboard—becomes the perfect way for me to lock myself into the first mode of design until the time is right to zoom in.</p>
<p>After my first experiment with this stuff this morning I had a ton of feedback and it was unanimous: this way of making designs and presenting them helps me focus, helps me communicate, guiding my hand as I walk through the problems and the potential solutions to them.</p>
<p>But wait, where does the Magic Keyboard come into this though? Well.</p>
<p>When I first heard of the Magic Keyboard I scoffed aloud because it’s horribly overpriced and is made of that same nasty plastic material they use for their old iPad covers. <em>Nah, I’m good mate</em>, I thought rather obnoxiously.</p>
<p>But! The Magic Keyboard changes <em>everything</em>. And I feel like a terrible-tech-daddy-shill for saying this, but it’s true. The Magic Keyboard feels like a Kindle in the same way that you’re not precious about it. It is designed to get a job done and it feels like a keyboard from those old plastic laptops made for kids back in the 90s. It is familiar and warm and somehow...better than a laptop keyboard (?) because it’s so much closer to the table that your wrists don’t have to arch up slightly to type.</p>
<p>Sketching an idea, then snapping the iPad back onto the keyboard to record a longer paragraph of text, is how...well...it’s not just how design should work. It’s what we ought to expect of computers in general.</p>
<hr />
<p>The Magic Keyboard by itself is nothing more than an expensive keyboard. The Apple Pencil by itself is nothing more than a fancy and expensive stylus. The iPad Pro by itself is nothing more than an expensive, bigger tablet.</p>
<p>But together, this fabulous system emerges. I can hop into a text file, edit things on my site, and then I can pop the iPad out and sit on my couch and sketch out UI ideas without having to be precious about them. I can share my screen with distant colleagues and scratch notes and improvements that need to be made. With the Files app and iPhoto, sharing bits of data back and forth between people is almost perfect.</p>
<p>It is serious bicycle-of-the-mind type stuff.</p>
<p>This reminds me of seeing the iPhone for the first time; I genuinely didn’t care. <em>Eh</em>. It has a touch screen, sure, but it’s expensive. There’s so few apps, it has a broken web browser where I have to zoom in all the time. The things are cool and interesting but the system is bad. Not bicycle-of-the-mind at least.</p>
<p>And then the second generation iPod Touch came out. By that time the App Store had released, the device wasn’t tethered to a network but you could use WiFi, responsive design had swept the world, and a million iterative improvements had suddenly made the device this glorious, perfect machine. All the constituent parts made sense and improved all the other parts in the system. Absolutely perfect, bicycle-of-the-mind.</p>
<p>The Apple Watch right now is just before that stage, I think. It‘s mostly useless except for the calorie counting stuff. Notifications are a bad and a stressful idea. Phone calls on it don’t really make sense (yet?). Other apps don’t make sense for it either, to me at least. But maybe in a few years all these disparate, clunky, half-finished parts will click satisfyingly together and then—boom!</p>
<p>This is the space where the iPad Pro, the Apple Pencil, and the Magic Keyboard, occupies today. They’re not just another way to do laptop-things-on-the-go. It lets me perform entirely non-laptop actions.</p>
<p>It’s not even a bicycle-for-the-mind, it’s a rocket powered jumbo jet; this little machine is what every computer should aspire to be.</p>
Cover stars2020-08-24T16:16:43Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/cover-stars/<p>This collection of <a href="http://blog.presentandcorrect.com/cover-stars-2">animated book covers</a> from Henning Lederer is fascinating and delightful. This video that collects many of these covers is especially worth studying if you’re into animation:</p>
<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/297671782?color=ffffff&portrait=0&badge=0" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<p>All this has me wondering: what if I take some of these ideas and apply them to the homepage of my site or perhaps to <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/volume-a.html">Volume A</a>? I feel like a black and white animation on the Kindle like this would be <em>incredible</em>. Imagine if instead of a gaudy ad when you locked the screen you’d see a cover of the book you’re currenly reading. When you pick up the device the cover would animate just like this.</p>
<p>Adding this to the endless list of things that would make the Kindle better.</p>
An Astronomical Clunk2020-08-23T02:38:06Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/an-astronomical-clunk/<p>Sometimes I forget what the web is capable of. I watch the code and the text and the opinions fly around and it feels like I’ve seen it all.</p>
<p>But then there are the other times. The ones where I have an idea, jot it down with Codepen, and send the link to a pal to see what they think. Or there are those rare and special moments when a stranger emails me with a link to a doc or a project they’re working on—websites about books or books about design or random fonts wrenched out of the aether.</p>
<p>It’s these moments when the web holds up to its original promise; the web standards, the infrastructure, the open web. With eyes wide open I watch as this beige suite of specifications link together until they’re like constellations out of stars in the sky. It all begin to makes sense. But it’s not just the technologies that fit together in these moments, it’s the skills, too. When I’m excited about design, and writing, and coding all at the same time, and when each of them can be seen as the same thing, just from different angles.</p>
<p>There’s this feeling when this happens; an immensely satisfying <em>clunk</em>.</p>
<hr />
<p>When someone asks me what I do I tend to say “web designer” but that’s not quite right because when someone hears “web designer” they think of that as building some giant boring e-commerce thing. They don’t see the excitement or the punk rock pamphleteering side of web design, the gathering of strangers. They see the web as this meaner, more horrid thing perhaps. Or they think of web masters and hacking. I’m not sure what they’re thinking about when they hear those words but the bored look is heartbreaking because I want to grab them by the lapel and say no! Do you not see the stars aligning? Have you never pressed the big green publish button? How can you not see that the web is the most important thing we’re all making together? That we continue to make together?</p>
<p>I don’t get this feeling with the web and writing everyday. But when I do it reaffirms every decision I’ve made in my life. Earlier this evening I was helping my pal <a href="https://twitter.com/LuBellWoo">Lucy</a> work on a small website and all these feelings struck me again; when you just can’t type fast enough, when every idea is possible and teasing you to explore it further, and where you get to question what a website even is.</p>
<p>I guess my point is that I’m extraordinary lucky. Just look at this satellite of beautiful web weirdos I’ve surrounded myself with! This astronomical <em>clunk</em> of technologies and most unlikely skills.</p>
A Lighthouse, A Man, A City2020-08-21T16:27:19Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/a-lighthouse-a-man-a-city/<p>I’ve been replaying Bioshock Infinite this week on the Switch and two things stand out to me: wow is it incredible that the Switch can even play this thing. I sense my 9 year old self losing his mind thinking that such an enormous and beautiful, story-led game can run on a handheld device like this. Second, and perhaps more important though, the sound design in this game is upsettingly perfect. The way music echoes around buildings and across the skyline, the way characters talk, the sound of the wind blowing about as you stand on a towering statue made of gold overlooking Columbia, this magnificent floating city in the clouds.</p>
<p>The music, too! The way it combines those happy 1920s jangles against the overwhelming violence and racism, the disparity of Columbia.</p>
<p>On that note, I had forgotten about that part of the game—how Columbia is this false utopia, how it shows that this golden city in the sky is sustained because of the downtrodden, because of the racism that holds it all together. I don’t remember anyone talking about that stuff when the game came out. The hero you play, Booker, walks through the world and sees it all though. He sees the pain and suffering, the racism, but he doesn’t care. Perhaps this is intentional, perhaps not, but Booker is there for the treasure and not for anyone else along the way.</p>
<p>The world is a broken place, and you’re just passing by.</p>
The DNC2020-08-19T15:47:08Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-dnc/<p>After watching the Democratic National Convention last night, and for the first time in 3 years, I felt pangs of genuine hope. Sure, some of the music videos are cheesy and some of the points are a bit repetitive. But the video of the first day in the convention is genuinely uplifting.</p>
<p>I wondered though: why do we have to wait 4 years for a moment like this? The Democrats should hold an event like this every single year; educating the public about the state of Senate and House races, about the Democratic legislative agenda, about what was accomplished over the past year, and how to make this country a more just place.</p>
<p>It would be an E3 or Nintendo Direct or an Apple keynote but far, far more important. No celebrities, no propaganda. But just like this: talking about empathy, discussing how to fix the economy. A Democratic Publishing Platform for the Tik Tok generation.</p>
<p>Anyway, last night I realized that I’m a Democrat. I won’t stand any more galaxy-brain “both parties are the same” madness. We have no time for that.</p>
<p>There is far too much work to do.</p>
Oh! What a Joyous Thing2020-08-17T20:30:08Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/oh-what-a-joyous-thing/<p>Today I’m struggling with context-switching as I’m hopping wildly between front-end development to visual design and icon alignment back to copywriting and then user research. It’s a lot to juggle and today is one of those days where I feel like I’m goofing everything up. Too many plates are spinning and I don’t have the focus or the nerve required to keep them all up in the air.</p>
<p>Whilst I have the UX clearly in my sights I drop the ball when it comes to the alignment of text, the color of things, the visual treatment. Basic, obvious, junior typesetting stuff. And when I switch back to code for the first time in a while I’m sort of lazy and I make obvious mistakes. I hack things together and hop around solving all sorts of random problems without digging into this one problem, making a PR for it, and then moving onto the next thing once it’s done.</p>
<p>The way I know I’m screwing things up a bit is when I go back to a design or some code an hour later and spot all these painfully obvious things. It’s like when I context-switch I lose the ability to see this new thing clearly and it takes a while for my senses to tune into this new problem space. It’s why I think I’m an extraordinarily slow designer, I get there eventually but damn I sure enough took the slowest route to get there.</p>
<p>Over the years there have been some great visual designers I’ve worked with who can’t see the UX problems, or they can’t see the underlying code insanity. It’s not really a matter of context switching for them because they never get to that place of doing this whole other thing well. They always struggle with things outside their wheelhouse and yet they don’t ever really see how bad they are at it.</p>
<p>This is why we have more than one person on a team, people to fill in the gaps of your knowledge and your skill set. If there’s a React wizard on the team then I shouldn’t have to worry about some new API—I’m hoping they’ll tell me about it. And by letting them handle those problems, or asking them for a review of things to double check I’m not being lazy, it instills this extra degree of trust on a team.</p>
<p>The real nightmare scenario is when teams are mismanaged and there are these enormous gaps in the skill sets of everyone combined. For example if someone is great at UI design but then no-one is there to represent the UX side of things, those problems will never be seen. If there’s no one on the team that cares about performance or animations then there will be an imbalance in the thing you build. It’ll be slow and clunky and will be sort of lifeless. It’s why I argue so strongly for dedicated front-end engineers on a team. It’s just too much work to manage for one person.</p>
<p>On this note, this is where school teaches us all the wrong ideas. It tells us that we’re all alone, every project is the sole achievement by one person. And the shocking thing about getting a job for the first time is realizing how you desperately need to depend on others. One person’s amazing stunts and talents don’t matter as much as the health and well-being of those distributed skill sets across the whole team.</p>
<p>But when you have that level of trust, those overlapping skills, and great management? Oh, what a joyous thing.</p>
1940s.nyc2020-08-16T04:41:34Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/1940s-nyc/<p>This website is truly remarkable; it’s a vast archive of photographs that were taken in <a href="https://1940s.nyc/map/photo/nynyma_rec0040_1_00204_0016#13.69/40.7093/-73.99397">NYC throughout the 1940s</a> but each picture has been geotagged—so you can click anywhere on the map and jump straight to that location. Make sure to click the Outtakes section in the top right, too. That’s where you’ll find a ton of random images and poorly taken pictures where it looks like the camera went off in someone’s pocket as they were crossing the street.</p>
<p>Remarkable.</p>
Hypercards2020-08-15T17:20:29Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/hypercards/<p>The other day I faffed about <a href="https://codepen.io/robinrendle/pen/JjXddMM">with stacked cards on the web</a> and came up with a somewhat interesting demo that <a href="https://css-tricks.com/stacked-cards-with-sticky-positioning-and-a-dash-of-sass">I then wrote about</a> for CSS-Tricks. Basically the jist is that position sticky is one of those CSS kickflips that is constantly forcing me to rethink things:</p>
<p class="codepen" data-height="500" data-theme-id="20935" data-default-tab="result" data-user="robinrendle" data-slug-hash="JjXddMM" style="height: 300px; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; border: 2px solid; margin: 1em 0; padding: 1em; margin-bottom:40px;" data-pen-title="Stacked Cards: Horizontal">
<span>See the Pen <a href="https://codepen.io/robinrendle/pen/JjXddMM">
Stacked Cards: Horizontal</a> by Robin Rendle (<a href="https://codepen.io/robinrendle">@robinrendle</a>)
on <a href="https://codepen.io/">CodePen</a>.</span>
</p>
<script async="" src="https://static.codepen.io/assets/embed/ei.js"></script>
<p>To do something like this not so long ago would’ve required a mountain of JavaScript. Also I had one demo—which I’ve now lost—where you could scroll within these cards. It would be pretty nifty for a portfolio or if you wanted to show a collection of books on a webpage and I’m sure there’s a million other nifty things you could do with this idea.</p>
Aglet Mono2020-08-12T17:21:26Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/aglet-mono/<p>For more than a week I’ve had a tab open just for <a href="https://xyztype.com/fonts/aglet_mono">Aglet Mono</a> from XYZ Type and I can’t seem close it. And in a world overrun by <em>ehhhhh</em> lookin’ monospace fonts, I think this one stands up and has something new to say. It has all the oomph of FF Meta, and the rounded loveliness of Aglet Slab:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/aglet-mono.png" alt="Aglet Mono" /></p>
<p>I feel bad dunking on a lot of monospace fonts but every other week I see folks mention the latest fancy thing and I kinda sigh a tiny bit because they’re not doing anything new. They’re covering the same ground as things that have come before them with no twist, no dash of inspiration.</p>
<p>Okay, enough moaning, back to work!</p>
The Past is Not Dead and Can Never Die2020-08-12T15:00:56Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-past-is-not-dead-and-can-never-die/<p>Clint Smith drove to Talbot County, Maryland—the hometown of Frederick Douglass—and he wrote this <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/looking-for-frederick-douglass/614179/">lovely and heartbreaking piece</a> about the trip. He notes that Douglass feared that the Civil War would be used as propaganda, that the Confederacy might be forgiven for slavery, that in fact we might begin to celebrate them instead:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I am not of that school of thinkers which teaches us to let bygones be bygones; to let the dead past bury its dead,” Douglass said in 1883. “In my view there are no bygones in the world, and the past is not dead and cannot die.”</p>
</blockquote>
How would I improve RSS?2020-08-09T03:00:06Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/how-would-i-improve-rss/<p><a href="http://interconnected.org/home/2020/07/29/improving_rss">Matt Webb</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My sense is that RSS is having a mini resurgence. People are getting wary of the social media platforms and their rapacious appetite for data. We’re getting fatigued from notifications; our inboxes are overflowing. And people are saying that maybe, just maybe, RSS can help. So I’m seeing RSS being discussed more in 2020 than I have done for years. There are signs of life in the ecosystem.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As someone who still feels that this ecosystem is the highlight of the web (and as someone who is maybe beginning to build a writing career because of that same ecosystem), I certainly hope so. In the future I can imagine all sorts of platforms built on top of RSS, beyond podcasts, and I think in this post Matt shows where some of those exciting ideas might lead.</p>
<p>Also, I still believe in a Kindle/<a href="https://www.analogue.co/pocket">Analogue</a>-esque device that, within it, contains an operating system that is half Patreon, half Substack, half Instapaper.</p>
<p>I think of this as the Republic of Newsletters writ large—<em>The OmniBlog</em>—where writers can publish their work and folks can subscribe via RSS but with a <a href="https://coil.com/">Coil</a>-esque payment system built in and preloaded onto a physical e-reader. Writers could blog away, connected to eachother, whilst readers could subscribe to their work and perhaps even fund larger pieces of writing—like <a href="https://www.robinsloan.com/sloanstarter/">Robin</a> and <a href="https://github.com/cmod/craigstarter">Craig</a>. But also mix that that fanciness up with all the vulnerability of <a href="https://twitter.com/cassmarketos">Cassie</a> and all the <em>wow, zoom, pow</em> of <a href="https://twitter.com/vruba">Charlie</a>. And the working-in-public sensibilities of <a href="https://destroytoday.com/">Jonnie</a>. Add that stuff alongside the musings of <a href="https://twitter.com/alicebartlett">Alice</a> and the focused, technical writing of <a href="https://blog.stephaniestimac.com/">Stephanie</a> and <a href="https://sarahdrasnerdesign.com/">Sarah</a>. Oh, and the political rants of <a href="https://twitter.com/jonlovett">Jon</a>. And the many, many more writers and bloggers and people that I adore.</p>
<p><em>Shit</em>, I just described Medium huh.</p>
Profits ≠ Economy2020-08-06T16:27:58Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/profits-%E2%89%A0-economy/<p>“Republicans are just better at the economy,” he said as I went down—the gunfire and explosions rattling all around me. It took me one whole beat but I realized that—whilst I was watching my pal-who-has-disagreeable-politics kill everyone around me in this stupid videogame at 1am—it was this subject, this one talking point, that is the greatest threat to this election for Democrats; the belief that Republicans are good at the economy.</p>
<p>Setting aside what “good” really means for now, which political party is better for the economy? I’m asking that question earnestly. Because if you were to ask relatives or friends then you’ll likely get the answer you expect, but ask the vast majority of Americans and they’ll say Republicans should be trusted with the economy without a doubt.</p>
<p>So once my pal-who-has-disagreeable-politics said that I wondered: which political party really <em>is</em> better at the economy? What legislation can we look at? What improvements to the economy are Republican-led initiatives? For now, let’s not dig through the vast history of Republican economics or their talking points and instead focus on a specific bit of recent legislation: the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. God I hate that name, but let’s continue.</p>
<p>Republicans argued that it would stimulate the economy, vastly increasing the number of new jobs. Wages would increase. Employees would get massive bonuses. And it would <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/11/the-treasury-has-finally-explained-how-the-trump-tax-plan-would-pay-for-itself-and-its-already-being-attacked/">pay for itself</a> without adding to the national debt.</p>
<p>As all these talking points go, it sounds mighty fine. I want all these things for the economy. But if you look beyond the talking points—look at the work itself—and you’ll find incompetence and malfeasance at every level. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s summary of this $1.5 trillion tax plan? A one page <a href="https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Documents/TreasuryGrowthMemo12-11-17.pdf">measly PDF</a>.</p>
<p>Well, let’s ignore my own political leanings for a bit and try to look at what happened next without bias. Ignoring the coronavirus, we’ll look at the two years since it passed. Were the Republicans right? Did the economy boom in those two years?</p>
<p>In short: nope! Not even remotely. <a href="https://billmoyers.com/story/trumps-tax-cuts-were-a-disaster-naturally-republicans-want-even-more/">Every talking point was a lie</a>. The economy didn’t boom after the tax cut. Wages didn’t increase. There was not an explosion of new jobs. Employees didn’t see bonuses. And the Congressional Budget Office <a href="https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56050?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzEmail&utm_content=812526&utm_campaign=Express_2020-01-28_14%3a30%3a00">estimates</a> a deficit of $1 trillion for 2020. And all of that was before the pandemic hit our shores.</p>
<p>What did increase in that time? Corporate profits.</p>
<p>So when Republicans say “economics” they don’t mean the general financial well-being of society—lifting folks out of poverty, abolishing homelessness, improving the quality of jobs, etc. etc.—what they mean is “profits” instead. But they’ve weaved this fantastic myth about themselves, as the Grand Old Party that should be entrusted with the economy so the childish Democrats don’t fuck it up.</p>
<p>But everything everyone says about the Republican party’s economic record is a myth. As my friend said the other day: “it’s funny that it’s capitalism on the way up, and then socialism on the way down.”</p>
<p>So are Republicans better for the economy? Nope. Are they better for increasing corporate profits without any of that seeing a worker’s pockets? Yep!</p>
That Blessed Destination2020-08-01T22:02:30Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/that-blessed-destination/<p>I’m sat in my kitchen listening to President Obama’s eulogy for John Lewis and absolutely not crying:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have to translate our passion and our causes into laws [...] like John we have to fight even harder for the most powerful tool we have which is the right to vote. The Voting Rights Act is one of the crowning achievements of our democracy. It’s why John crossed that bridge, spilled his blood. [...] If politicians want to honor John [...] let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for. [...] Once we’ve passed the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, we should keep marching to make it even better by making sure every American is automatically registered to vote.</p>
</blockquote>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/V1pKoCq1bn0" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
Tokyo Train Station Stamps2020-07-31T15:55:38Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/tokyo-station-stamps/<p>For my birthday I played a game with some pals where, via Discord, we streamed one of us opening up Google Maps and walking to highschool via street view. It was extremely adorable and we started telling each other stories about these multi-year long walks; about our friends and families, how they changed over time, and how we were influenced by the geography of the place itself.</p>
<p>Ali mentioned that in Tokyo each train station has a little kiosk where you can collect a stamp—after a quick search I found this gorgeous Tumblr-esque site chock full of these <a href="http://stamp.otimusya.com/sinjyuku-line2.html">train station stamps</a> and oh boy oh wow heck yes.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/tokyo-station-stamps.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>This has me wondering...how might I make this stamp effect with SVG filters? I think that’s what I’ll take a crack at this weekend since I haven’t really played around with filters at all. Plus, since moving back into a full-time design role, I’m sort of dying to work on a fun side project that’s all about front-end development again.</p>
Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation2020-07-30T16:24:37Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/together-you-can-redeem-the-soul-of-our-nation/<p>John Lewis <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/opinion/john-lewis-civil-rights-america.html">wrote this essay</a> to be read on the day of his funeral:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.</p>
<p>Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.</p>
</blockquote>
A Problem of Trust2020-07-30T15:30:08Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/a-problem-of-trust/<p>It wasn’t just attacking our bodies. Instead, the pandemic had found a weakness in the unbreakable social bonds that we share with one another. Our need to hold someone, to hug them, to be close to another person, anyone, even a stranger. But now, as cases in Europe are falling and the pandemic is still devastating us here in the States, I realize that the virus attacks more than just our bodies and the social bonds between us.</p>
<p>The virus has found other forms of weakness.</p>
<p>Countries outside the U.S. have proved that the pandemic is not a tech problem, as they understood relatively early that the only way to fight this pandemic is with brutal, unnerving honesty; accurately reporting cases, providing tests for those that need them along with free health care, isolating people that have the virus, etc. All that honesty requires enormous doses of courage, too.</p>
<p>This is why America is wrecked by the pandemic, because we cannot fathom problems that are beyond the realm of tech. Everyone is frantically waiting for the vaccine or an app—a magic spell that will remove the curse—but this virus is highlighting the most important problem in our society today, one that no magic spell can deter. And that’s because the pandemic is not a problem with tech, it’s a problem with trust and honesty and having spent the last 4 years unbundling our civic discourse in public—tearing apart the seams between us all. Setting us all on a knife’s edge.</p>
<p>It’s why we’re obsessed with potential vaccines, whilst other countries have proved that we simply don’t need one to control the situation. Here in America we would rather a business swoop in to save the day, instead of look closely at ourselves and the qualities that the virus has latched onto. The qualities that are in such short supply today; trust, honesty, courage.</p>
<p>To fix this problem our federal, state, and local governments—the body politic at large—would have to discard everything that they know about the world and how they operate. They would have to ignore everything the news says, they would have to ignore the worst parts of their base. They would have to do something devastating to their political careers, but essential for the health of our nation: They would have to be honest. They would have to grow a spine.</p>
<p>Also, hi, did you know that there’s only 95 days, 13 hours, and 14 minutes until the election? We can fix this problem slowly, painfully, with one vote at a time. Our country really doesn’t have to function in this way. We can build a government worthy of our trust and worthy of our pride and all it requires is us to take action. We can <a href="https://secure.actblue.com/donate/web-donate">donate</a>. We can <a href="https://votesaveamerica.com/be-a-voter/">register to vote</a>. Is it a small degree of change? Yes. Will it fix the country tomorrow? No. Will you be remembered as a freedom fighter for donating $5 to a political campaign you believe in? Probably not.</p>
<p>But each tiny act like this builds on the next, all these moments snowball into something important, something vital: a government worthy of our trust and worthy of our pride.</p>
A website is an essay2020-07-29T15:33:49Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/a-website-is-an-essay/<p>This new ebook-esque Gameboy-cartridge playin’ synthesizer called <a href="https://www.analogue.co/pocket/">Analogue Pocket</a> looks nifty. I like the design of the site here because it squares up neatly with my theory that the best websites are in fact secret essays. And I also reckon that thinking about a website like an essay is helpful because then we can start to push back against certain trends or requirements of modern web design.</p>
<p>This reminds me of Panic’s <a href="https://play.date/">PlayDate</a> console that they announced not so long ago, not only because the design aesthetics for the hardware are a bit similar but also since the website is an essay! I wonder if I should make a collection of these sorts of sites for future reference. <a href="https://buttondown.email/">Buttondown</a> is one such website that I think about often.</p>
No one is above grief2020-07-28T15:00:21Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/no-one-is-above-grief/<p>I somehow stumbled upon a piece this morning called <a href="https://crooked.com/articles/john-mccain-death-politics/"><em>Mourning a Patriot Whose Politics You Hate</em></a> by Jon Lovett. It’s written just after the death of Senator John McCain in August of 2018 and it’s about how although Jon disagrees with everything about McCain’s politics, there’s a shred of hope to be found in that disagreement:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>John McCain was funny and acerbic and had soul and pathos and blind spots and cruelty and conviction. He was bellicose. He was bled and broken and brave for his country. He was dangerous and his decency as a man is belied by the death toll of the foreign policy he espoused. He sold out to corporations but he believed in campaign finance reform. He saved Obamacare but would have repealed it. He was enamored of independence and then surprised you by living up to it, rarely. He was complicated. He believed in America. He was big in a place filled with tiny tiny little fuckers. He was a patriot and he was wrong. He was a patriot and if there is a core challenge we face right now, if you could say in one sentence what may doom this country, it is that cowardice, greed, hate, and power have drained the patriotism of one of our two political parties.</p>
<p>It’s true, the world would be far worse if John McCain had his way. But it would be far better if more politicians had a shred of his character. And that ought to be mourned. That ought to be grieved.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>McCain was one of those frustrating Sorkin-esque West Wing Republicans where you disagree with his politics in every which way, and fundamentally because they’re cruel and short-sighted, but he was still an honest man. He was not an evil caricature or an ego-driven maniac. And so it’s troubling that in the Republican party today there’s not one person I could count in that camp. Not a single damn one.</p>
<p>My point: those that let #45 continue his rampage are not good, honest people. And we must not forgive them for it.</p>
The Color of Law2020-07-27T15:35:31Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-color-of-law/<p>I thought I understood racist housing policy in America. I knew about redlining and I knew about how freeways were used to cut portions of cities into ghettos. But I didn’t fully understand the sheer overwhelming <em>scale</em> of segregation or the extent of the pain that this actual conspiracy inflicted on the Black community.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://bookshop.org/books/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten-history-of-how-our-government-segregated-america/9781631494536"><em>The Color of Law</em></a>, Richard Rothstein explains precisely how successive American goverments denied Black people housing, how white Americans used homeowner associations to prevent other white people selling their homes to Black folks, how schools were built in areas to deny access to Black people a chance of higher education, and how the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 devastated Black people specifically.</p>
<p>Rothstein lays out how multiple generations of wealth were denied to the Black community by denying government-backed loans after World War II. And this had a devastating effect of creating wealth that might be passed onto their kids because predominately wealth is created with housing. Whilst white Americans emerged from World War II with loans and construction subsidies to build white only neighborhoods which catapulted them out of poverty, Black Americans were denied that financial lifeline.</p>
<p>I think this book taught me something important beyond this tragedy though, and it’s in how we might try to undo segregation which is still an enormous problem today. Rothstein writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We might contemplate a remedy like this: Considering that African Americans comprise about 15 percent of the population of the New York metropolitan area, the federal government should purchase the next 15 percent of houses that come up for sale in Levittown at today’s market rates (approximately $350,000). It should then resell the properties to African Americans for $75,000, the price (in today’s dollars) that their grandparents would have paid if permitted to do so.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What I realized here is that a change of heart is not enough to combat racism and to undo the damage we’ve all done; we must learn about policy. And reparations should be made through housing specifically.</p>
Capacity2020-07-17T15:40:59Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/capacity/<p>Sometimes I worry that I don’t have the intellectual or creative capacity for design. I guess I’ve spent enough time working as a designer at this point that I can tell if something is good or not. When it’s bad I get uncomfortable and I begin to squint at the UI until my brain hurts and I groan. That doesn’t mean that I know how to fix the problem though. And that’s where I worry about my capacity for this kind of work.</p>
<p>I’ve been in a ton of design crits where I’ve looked at a design, felt that familiar haze of confusion where nothing makes sense, and then unhelpfully said “I don’t think this works but I cannot for the life of me tell you why.” Debugging complex UX decisions on the spot feels like trying to listen to someone speaking Dutch whilst you’re also solving a flexbox issue whilst <em>also</em> learning how to read Aramaic. Explaining why things don’t make sense is sometimes just as difficult as explaining why a particular color or a font doesn’t match another. There are rules, there is a kind of science to this work, but expressing it is almost impossible.</p>
<p>In a design the problem is never the work of colors or fonts alone. It’s how things are structured, organized, divvied up. How things are bucketed and described. On this note, I remember one time seeing a design manager’s poorly organized spreadsheet many years ago and I caught myself thinking <em>how on earth can I trust you</em>? How can you possibly be desinging a billion dollar web app when you can barely organize text into columns and rows?</p>
<p>A couple of months (?) ago I mentioned that if I ever ran a design course I would let folks pick a big book—it doesn’t matter which so long as it’s their favorite—and then get them to typeset it in eight different ways. And I think I now have an idea for the second lesson: <em>here is a bunch of messy data</em>, I’d say, <em>now you must gather it together, synthesize it, unbundle it. We’ll then discuss how your spreadsheet uses rows/columns, headings, and color to make this information clear.</em></p>
<p>My point with this long ramble? Spreadsheets are cool, I guess.</p>
LfA Aluminia2020-07-16T00:21:17Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/lfa-aluminia/<p>By some cruel fate and in a long running conspiracy involving secret foreign governments and spies, not to mention the tens of millions of dollars of shady private funding that has been poured into this network of deception...something something something...I somehow missed the release of <a href="https://shop.letterformarchive.org/products/aluminia-fonts?variant=7014645497892">LfA Aluminia</a>, a typeface designed by Jim Parkinson and published by the Letterform Archive back in 2017.</p>
<p>It was a conspiracy I tell ya because just <em>look</em> at this thing!</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/alum-1.png" alt="A specimen of Aluminia" /></p>
<p>I love the squarish-ness of it, the way that it all looks like an italic from a distance. I love its New-Yorker-I-am-wearing-a-bowler-hat-and-having-a-great-time sort of vibe. I like the difference in height between the capital letters and the x-height, its almost-Chaparral look. Okay, okay. I’ll admit it; I love it all.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/alum-2.png" alt="Another specimen of Aluminia" /></p>
<p>The type family—Roman, italic, small caps, and oblique—is based on the 1930s metal type family Electra, designed by W.A.Dwiggins. And there’s <a href="https://letterformarchive.org/news/recasting-aluminia">a great interview</a> with the designer Jim Parkinson about how he interpreted those old designs. But! The Letterform Archive folks also took a bit from Dwiggins’s specimen of Electra in the 1930s where the designer is asking someone what the new century of type design will feel like:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Electricity” he said, “sparks, energy — high-speed steel — metal shavings coming off a lathe — precise, positive — say it with a snap.” I waited to see if he would get closer to something that I could use. “Take your curves and stream-line ’em. Make a line of letters so full of energy that it can’t wait to get to the end of the measure. My God — these Lino machines that you tell me about — what kind of letters would they spit out if you left it to them? 1500 Venetian? Not!”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Anyway, I got so excited about this that I switched out the body text here with Aluminia, too. Does it pair well with Ayer as the headline? <em>Mmmmmm...</em> maybe not so much. But I sort of like how everything is extremely wonky right now. I think if I paired Aluminia with something less weird than Ayer than it could push the scales too far in the direction of the New Yorker and make my writing feel a bit pompous perhaps? Yeah.</p>
<p>Although...the flash of text is now somewhat worse, and it was pretty bad before this change. I’ll fix that at a later point as I probably have to rethink my whole font loading strategy.</p>
Bias is Inevitable2020-07-15T16:59:37Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/bias-is-inevitable/<p>A while ago, <a href="https://twitter.com/doralchan?lang=en">Dora</a> wrote about <a href="https://blog.prototypr.io/avoiding-bias-in-user-interviews-d23aa2fb4fd2">conducting user interviews</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You have to stop adding your own voice and take to the topic. For example, don’t ask “What do you like about A?” or “What do you not like about A?” Instead, ask “What do you think about A?” This really matters because these questions affect the data, which affects the product direction.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This all sounds like relatively simple advice but I’ve noticed over the years just how bad most interviews are, whether that’s in design or journalim. And it’s most certainly a thing that I struggle with because I just want to fix the problem desperately and give them help. But you cannot help the user during an interview.</p>
<p>You just have to sit there and wince.</p>
Performance Monitoring 2020-07-15T01:02:38Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/performance-monitoring/<p>Chris wrote about <a href="https://css-tricks.com/the-analytics-that-matter/">the analytics that matter</a> earlier this month:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’ve long been skeptical of quoting global browser usage percentages to justify their usage of browser features. It doesn’t matter what global usage of a browser is, other than nerdy cocktail party fodder. The usage that matters is what users on your site are using, and that can be wildly different from site to site.</p>
<p>That idea of tracking real usage of your actual site concept has bounced around my head the last few days. And it’s not just “I can’t use CSS grid because IE 11 has 1.42% of global usage still” stuff, it’s about measuring metrics that matter to your site, no matter what they are.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is true not just for browser stats, but also for performance, too. So if we’re using Lighthouse scores to figure out the performance of our sites then that’s surely better than nothing at all <em>but</em> it doesn’t show us what is actually happening: how are our customers experiencing our websites? What pages and transactions are slow? How big is the problem? And then, crucially: how do we go about fixing these issues?</p>
<p>On this note, the other day I was talking to <a href="https://twitter.com/doralchan?lang=en">Dora</a> and she broke this down into two types of data: field and lab. Field metrics are real, user data. The stuff that gives us a clear insight into what our customers and doing and how we can make their lives easier. Whereas lab metrics come from a hypothetical environment, like Lighthouse scores, or even testing that you yourself have experienced. Lab metrics sure are helpful, and they’ll most certainly lead us in the right direction, but they’re not <em>real</em>. Lab metrics always have a certain degree of bias in them, which again is okay if we know that.</p>
<p>As Dora mentioned to me in that chat: “bias is inevitable.”</p>
<p>All this stuff has been rolling about in my head for the last couple of months whilst I’ve been watching the team at Sentry work on a new feature called...wait for it...<a href="https://sentry.io/for/performance/">Performance</a>! It allows you to see which transactions in your app are slow but, not only that, Sentry does something pretty smart: we tie those slow transactions to specific releases in your codebase and we even point to preexisting issues—errors that we bundle together into groups to help you debug things—and it’s this magical stuff that gives you the ability to hop into your codebase, find the thing that’s a problem, and fix it right away.</p>
<p>I didn’t work on this feature at all, I’m only mentioning it here because I’m a big fan of the team and the project, and I’m especially a giant fan of where all this is going.</p>
<p>Also with this feature the team is introducing a new way to measure performance with a term they’ve started calling “User Misery.” It shows how many of your customers are experiencing slowness whilst using your app. This lets you prioritize tackling <em>this</em> performance issue over <em>that</em> one based on what your customers are actually experiencing and the scale of the problem itself. Nifty, huh? When they were showing me this stuff I realized that that’s the power of field metrics when it comes to performance.</p>
<p>You can learn more about all this stuff in the <a href="https://blog.sentry.io/2020/07/14/see-slow-faster-with-performance-monitoring">announcement post</a> and I am most certainly going to rant more about this work here in the future. Because oh boy golly gee whizz.</p>
Colorful Headings2020-07-13T15:45:06Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/colorful-headings/<p>Good morning! One small tip for your Monday morning typographic perambulations: I think we should always make headings darker than the body text. It’s a small change but it has a significant impact on longer chunks of text and is especially useful if you’re typesetting both headings and body text with the same typeface. Here’s an example:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/heading-color.png" alt="An example showing two blocks of text. One with body copy that is the same color as the heading, and another that is slightly lighter" /></p>
<p>Isn’t that so much better? It’s not typographically ingenius or anything but it does improve the overall shape of the text. And it makes you understand the relationship between these two different types of text much faster. Now imagine this in a book or on a website with all sorts of other information that your brain has to decode and this starts to become even more useful.</p>
<p>It also ties into my favorite thing to keep in mind when designing something: focus on the difference between differences. That’s a clunky way of saying “when something is different, make it look different.” The best designers, in my opinion, take this to heart and don’t use too many variants to make those differences as clear as possible.</p>
<p>You don’t need giant gradients and icons, you don’t need a million fonts (although we should experiment with as much of this stuff as we can). We can do everything we need to accomplish, at least here and in this one example, with just two colors and two text sizes.</p>
Wear a Mask2020-07-12T18:32:02Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/wear-a-mask/<p>I made <a href="https://codepen.io/robinrendle/pen/NWxzJPe">this silly thing</a> yesterday after I got back from a walk and was feeling rage beyond words:</p>
<p class="codepen" data-height="600" data-theme-id="20935" data-default-tab="result" data-user="robinrendle" data-slug-hash="NWxzJPe" style="height: 300px; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; border: 2px solid; margin: 1em 0; padding: 1em;" data-pen-title="Wear a mask animation">
<span>See the Pen <a href="https://codepen.io/robinrendle/pen/NWxzJPe">
Wear a mask animation</a> by Robin Rendle (<a href="https://codepen.io/robinrendle">@robinrendle</a>)
on <a href="https://codepen.io/">CodePen</a>.</span>
</p>
<script async="" src="https://static.codepen.io/assets/embed/ei.js"></script>
<p>I’ll be sure to write about how I made it in the <a href="https://css-tricks.com/newsletters/">CSS-Tricks newsletter</a> which is published every Monday morning and it always has a bunch of hot-takes and/or links to interesting web design things if that’s your jam.</p>
Reply links in RSS feeds2020-07-12T17:23:48Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/reply-links-in-rss-feeds/<p>Here’s a smart idea from Jonnie Hallman: adding <a href="https://2020.destroytoday.com/blog/reply-link-in-rss-feed-posts">a reply link</a> at the end of an entry in an RSS feed. Just as Jonnie mentions there, some folks reach out with smart ideas via email to some notes that I have as well. But I should really encourage those sorts of replies because they’re always interesting to read.</p>
<p>So I just did that! If you ever have thoughts/notes/ideas/criticisms of the stuff I’m writing then just hit reply at the end of this entry and rant away. I might not reply to everything but I will certainly read them all.</p>
<p>Anyway, thanks for the tip, Jonnie.</p>
The Strange Cultural Force of the Book Deal2020-07-11T16:58:10Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-strange-cultural-force-of-the-book-deal/<p>Anne Trubek, writing in her excellent newsletter, <a href="https://notesfromasmallpress.substack.com/"><em>Notes From A Small Press</em></a>, has some thoughts about how writing a book isn’t really the point for many authors. Instead, they’re all attracted to the prestige of publishing and its many trappings. And this is why they hire ghost writers and receive giant book deals, which subsequently distorts the field for so many honest folks trying to make a lovely thing. Anne writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’ve been thinking recently about the role that “a book deal” plays in American culture. I’m not talking in the dreams of unpublished writers, or the optics of #publishingpaidme. I am thinking about how it has become a synecdoche for cashing in and gaining prestige for politicians, celebrities, TED talk types, instagram influencers, and suddenly viral everyday folks.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’ve always been wary of people who chase badges and medals. You know the sort; people who desperately want to climb the ladder and who want all the benefits of the work without caring so much for the work itself. In the design industry this is clear when twenty year old kids can become Senior Product Designers with just a few years experience. Or on the speaking circuit when, in my experience, the best designers and engineers I’ve met are not the popular kids on stage. The most talented folks are those that just turn up to work, crank out beautiful things, and then go home quietly. And the more I read accounts of people like that, those chasing the prestige, the more I’m attracted to people who don’t care about any of that crap.</p>
<p>On this note: the other day I was listening to a podcast about how President Obama had a little plaque on his desk that read: <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BRCdveTlWQ3/?hl=en">“Hard things are hard.”</a> The commentator then said, well, for #45 his plaque should read: “Hard things are for someone else.”</p>
<p>Anyway, I’ve only been following Anne’s newsletter for a little while but I already adore her notes and thoughts about the publishing industry. Also, I just preordered her book, <a href="https://beltpublishing.com/collections/pre-order/products/so-you-want-to-publish-a-book"><em>So You Want to Publish a Book?</em></a>, which I am thoroughly excited for.</p>
A feature, not a bug2020-07-10T18:33:55Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/a-feature-not-a-bug/<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/opinion/trump-schools-reopening.html">Jamelle Bouie</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/489589-senate-rejects-gop-attempt-to-change-unemployment-benefits-in-stimulus-bill">Most Republican senators</a> voted to remove the unemployment expansion at its full size, but it survived. Billions of dollars of benefits have gone to tens of millions of Americans. The increase in aid was so great that, as The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/us/politics/coronavirus-poverty.html#click=https://t.co/6LfQmIUQ2G">reported</a> last month, the federal poverty rate declined even as the jobless rate reached incredible heights. And there’s also <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/25/people-receiving-unemployment-benefits-are-more-likely-to-look-for-jobs.html">no evidence</a> that additional benefits are keeping people who want to work from working.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This aid program is the first country-wide test of universal basic income and the not-so-shocking thing is this: it is absolutely working.</p>
<p>The question we have to ask ourselves is simple. What is more important to us, ensuring that everyone has a back-breaking job that keeps them and their family hovering perilously around the poverty line or the alternative: that we simply eliminate poverty? It appears that Republicans and moderate/right-learning Democrats believe poverty is a natural state of the world. But it’s really not, we invented it. And with programs like this it shows us a glimmer of hope as to how a universal basic income would end up saving us money, bolstering the economy, and helping millions of vulnerable people in the process.</p>
<p>Why shouldn’t we support a universal basic income though? Well, because we would have to tax the mega-rich fairly.</p>
<p>Also reading this piece I can’t help but think that the reason why Republicans want to keep poverty around is that they believe, yes, that it’s natural and that they believe that hard work is required to lift you out of poverty, but also this: it makes things so damn convenient for business owners. Imagine if businesses had to fight for workers to join them, instead of workers fighting each other for jobs?</p>
<p>Or, as Jamelle writes far more eloquently than I can muster:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Workers are kept on edge — and willing to accept whatever wage is on offer — by the threat of immiseration. This, for politicians who back both big business and existing social relations, is a feature and not a bug of our economic system, since insecurity and desperation keep power in the hands of capital and its allies. Even something as modest as expanded unemployment benefits is a threat to that arrangement, as they give workers the power to say no to work they do not want.</p>
</blockquote>
Momentum2020-07-10T01:56:01Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/momentum/<p>Last night I sat down to test out a mic I just picked up and boy howdy I didn’t know I had this rant in me. In the future I’ll keep these much shorter perhaps but this one is apparently about:</p>
<ul>
<li>Audio logs and videogames!</li>
<li>Vulnerability/writing</li>
<li>The difference between a personal site and social networks</li>
<li>Working alone on a project</li>
<li>Notes on the Kindle (and how this thing is bad at books but great at something else)</li>
</ul>
<p><audio controls="" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/audio/momentum.mp3"></audio></p>
Design is not about solving problems2020-07-09T16:48:48Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/design-is-not-about-solving-problems/<p>Well, now there’s a hot take huh. But let me explain. I think one of my shortcomings when it comes to design is this: I always want to fix the problem. I want to have the perfect idea, the perfect design doc, ready to go and implement right this second. But wait...isn’t this what design is supposed to do, solve problems?</p>
<p><em>mmmmm</em> yes and no.</p>
<p>In the early stages, solving the problem isn’t important. In fact, the first round of design that you show anyone should be focused on setting the stage for a discussion. It’s about gathering all the ideas and giving enough space for weirder, better ideas. Early designs should not try so damn hard to solve the problem, instead they should define and push the scope of the project into a frightening new territory.</p>
<p>I cannot count the number of times I’ve walked into a room and a designer shows a single idea, only for the whole crit session to collapse because not only have they <em>not</em> solved the problem in the best way but, also, since they’ve only shown one idea it makes folks feel antagonistic towards it. A cloud gathers, sparks fly. Suddenly everyone is dunking on the solution to this one problem because the problem itself was so poorly defined. Everyone keeps trying to make space for their ideas, for the scope of the project to change, and this feels like an attack. A designer resists, but all that fighting makes them look rather petty.</p>
<p>That’s the advantage of going hog-wild in the first round of design—you can make all these bonkers designs that help everyone understand the project, even if you’re not really all that much closer to solving the problem that you set out to solve.</p>
<p>I’m not preaching here because I eff this up all the time. I see a tiny design problem and try to crank it out in ten minutes, only to realize I should’ve spent <em>days</em> on it, reimagining everything, so that folks can push and pull me in the right direction.</p>
<p>So now what I’ve started to do is make a bunch of those buck-wild explorations and then show them to people as soon as I can. I don’t care about padding or margins or fonts, and I certainly don’t care about fancy illustrations. All those lovely pixels will have their moment, but in this one they are entirely unimportant.</p>
<p>Sure, a lot of these design ideas are half-mad, they don’t make any sense, they’re impossible to build, and they reveal my lack of knowledge and expertise—revealing my vulnerabilities—but they create this fabulous atmosphere where people are pitching in, letting their minds roll over all the possibilities of what this thing <em>might</em> become. And this lets you eventually, sort of, and not in a mean way, herd everyone (including yourself) towards the right idea. Towards solving the problem.</p>
<p>I know folks in graphic design have practiced this for centuries—showing multiple early concepts for a design—but I think there is enormous hesitation for product designers to do the same. Because they believe that their work is more science than art. Because they see far too much of themselves in the work. Because they aspire for minimalist interfaces and rational decision-making.</p>
<p>And design is that, sure, but it’s also absolutely not. Design is not solving a solution to a problem.</p>
<p>Design is debate, instead.</p>
Everything is the thing2020-07-09T16:15:53Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/everything-is-the-thing/<p>I love the big dad energy of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8KhKBLoSMk">this introductory video</a> to mmhmm, an app that lets you customize video presentations in a bunch of nifty ways. But what I like about it is that there’s no sense of <em>“I hAvE rEdesIgned vIdEo FoR tHe 21st CenTurY,”</em> which is perhaps the most annoying aspect about marketing of any kind today. A thing just can’t be a thing, it has to be <em>the</em> thing. The one you’ve always waited for. The thing that redefines All Things for a generation. A thing so perfect and thing-like that will it spread peace and happiness across the globe, quenching the thirst for revenge in your cold, dead heart.</p>
<p>Shoes, videogames, clothes, tv shows, books, music, <em>everything</em> is sold like this. Everything is The Thing—next to my desk right now there’s several books about finance and the economy and ugh each one has to be like “BIG BOOK TITLE: Subtitle that redefines the way we <em>wah</em> about <em>wah</em>.”</p>
<p>I sort of blame Apple I guess? Or maybe too many folks watching reruns of the carousel episode of <em>Mad Men</em>. But what if folks instead read a bunch of Wodehouse books and then went and made their app, or wrote their book, or designed their shoe or whatever, and then went out into the world and said “hi, this is it. i hope you like this thing. bye!”</p>
<p>Wouldn’t that be so damn refreshing?</p>
Sloanstarter2020-07-09T01:56:01Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/sloanstarter/<p>Now this is very interesting: the other day Robin released <a href="https://www.robinsloan.com/sloanstarter/">Sloanstarter</a>, his very own crowdfunding campaign for his web/ebook/Kindle novella (personally, I prefer <em>web novella</em> or might I suggest <em>webvella</em>? Oh, I might not? Wow, rude.)</p>
<p>The idea is simple. You pay Robin $9 for the story you’ll get a variety of ways to read the thing—but!—the <em>coolest</em> part of all this is that if the crowdfunding project is successful then Robin will release both the web version for free and make the code available on GitHub.</p>
<p>You can find a preview of <a href="https://www.robinsloan.com/sloanstarter/preview/">the <s><em>webvella</em></s> novella here</a>. And? I can’t remember the last time a story format was exciting like this. Perhaps <a href="https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football">17776</a>? Either way, Robin has expertly taken some of the familiar parts of a book, such as the concept of pages and swiping between them, and merged it with all the...lightness of a website. Click on either side of the page and with a Kindle-esque <em>click</em> you’re teleported to the next. There’s no big app-ness, no fancy animations to throw you off balance, no audio inserted where audio must not be inserted. There is a dash of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. And that’s all it needs.</p>
<p>And I know I’m prattling on at this point, perhaps embarrassing myself, but I truly <em>love</em> this format. As I’m slowly making this tiny Kindle book I find this pattern of <em>clicking</em> to the next chunk or idea very different than writing for a website, for a scrolling interface. The text just feels completely different, and I can play with all sorts of ideas that I think Robin is playing with here, too. Oh wait did I mention the fonts of this thing? So great! Okay, okay. I’ll stop now. Sorry.</p>
<p>Anyway, <a href="https://www.robinsloan.com/sloanstarter/">go support this thing</a>.</p>
Nichrome2020-07-09T01:46:14Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/nichrome/<p>Via <a href="https://www.robinsloan.com/">Robin’s newsletter</a> I just spotted this release on Future Fonts of <a href="https://www.futurefonts.xyz/mass-driver/nichrome">Nichrome</a> by Mass-Driver, “a display face referencing the typography of paperback science fiction from the 70s and early 80s.” And these numbers in particular are rather striking—make sure to look very closely at that 3:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/screen-shot-2020-07-08-at-6.45.40-pm.png" alt="A screenshot of Nichrome, a typeface by Mass Driver" /></p>
<p>I’m an enormous fan of Mass-Driver and Rutherford Craze’s work, going so far as to use his <a href="https://mass-driver.com/typefaces/md-system">MDSystem</a> type family not so long ago for <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/essays/dartmoor-death-stranding-and-me">Dartmoor, Death Stranding, and me</a>.</p>
Letter from Birmingham Jail2020-07-08T04:00:17Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/letter-from-birmingham-jail/<p>On April 16th, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a letter from jail, where he was imprisoned for marching against segregation, and Jason Pamental made <a href="https://letterfromjail.com/">a rather lovely typeset version</a>. In fact, <a href="https://rwt.io/newsletter">Jason’s newsletter</a> is a constant wellspring of lovely typeset things.</p>
<p>Rereading Dr King’s letter though it’s shocking that so much of it is still relevant today, 57 years later:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider.</p>
</blockquote>
Variable Fonts Experiments2020-07-07T20:20:40Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/variable-fonts-experiments/<p>This is a reminder for myself in the future that all the work that Mandy Michael has been doing with <a href="https://codepen.io/collection/XqRLMb/?cursor=ZD0wJm89MSZwPTEmdj01MDEyMTc5">variable fonts</a> is remarkable and showcases what’s possible if we start to push the web into a weird place with fonts.</p>
<p class="codepen" data-height="500" data-theme-id="light" data-default-tab="result" data-user="mandymichael" data-slug-hash="ExjNVOa" style="height: 265px; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; border: 2px solid; margin: 1em 0; padding: 1em;" data-pen-title="Corgo's with Jason">
<span>See the Pen <a href="https://codepen.io/mandymichael/pen/ExjNVOa">
Corgo's with Jason</a> by Mandy Michael (<a href="https://codepen.io/mandymichael">@mandymichael</a>)
on <a href="https://codepen.io/">CodePen</a>.</span>
</p>
<script async="" src="https://static.codepen.io/assets/embed/ei.js"></script>
How I Became a Police Abolitionist2020-07-07T20:07:06Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/how-i-became-a-police-abolitionist/<p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/how-i-became-police-abolitionist/613540/">Derecka Purnell</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Police couldn’t do what we really needed. They could not heal relationships or provide jobs. We were afraid every time we called. When the cops arrived, I was silenced, threatened with detention, or removed from my home. Fifteen years later, my old neighborhood still lacks quality food, employment, schools, health care, and air—all of which increases the risk of violence and the reliance on police. Yet I feared letting go; I thought we needed them.</p>
<p>[...] We never should have had police. Policing is among the vestiges of slavery, tailored in America to suppress slave revolts, catch runaways, and repress labor organizing. After slavery, police imprisoned Black people and immigrants under a convict-leasing system for plantation and business owners. During the Jim Crow era, cops enforced segregation and joined lynch mobs that grew strange fruit from southern trees. During the civil-rights movement, police beat the hell out of Black preachers, activists, and students who marched for equality wearing their Sunday best. Cops were the foot soldiers for Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs and Joe Biden’s 1994 crime bill. Police departments pepper-sprayed Occupy Wall Street protesters without provocation and indiscriminately teargassed Black Lives Matter activists for years—including me, twice. Black people I know trust police; they trust them to be exactly what they always have been.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This piece is extraordinarily kind and smart. And utterly convincing that police reform is not enough.</p>
War is a force that gives us meaning2020-07-05T16:05:43Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/war-is-a-force-that-gives-us-meaning/<p>“As long as we think abstractly,” writes Chris Hedges in his fantastic and heart-wrenching book <em>War is a force that gives us meaning</em>, “...as long as we find in patriotism and the exuberance of war our fulfillment [...] we will never discover who we are.” Every sentence of Hedges’s book is like this: punch after punch to the gut. In fact, the whole time I was reading his short book about war I felt that not a single sentence is wasted, almost everything is quotable.</p>
<p>Hedges writes about how war is a myth; we have been told that killing people is easy and clean, that war is honorable, that there are good wars and bad wars, that war can make us better people. But Hedges is not only critical of war but also the drug that fuels it: he goes to great length to argue that patriotism is one of the root causes of all this evil. Chris writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The military histories—which tell little of war’s reality—crowd out the wrenching tales by the emotionally maimed. Each generation again responds to war as innocents. Each generation discovers its own disillusionment—often after a terrible price. The myth of war and the drug of war wait to be tasted. The mythical heroes of the past loom over us. Those who can tell us the truth are silenced or prefer to forget. The state needs the myth, as much as it needs its soldiers and its machines of war, to survive.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That one bit, “the state needs the myth,” is what I was thinking about yesterday whilst reading Frederick Douglass’s 1852 Independence Day speech, <a href="https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/what-to-the-slave-is-the-fourth-of-july/"><em>What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?</em></a> Douglass writes that whilst many see the banners, the singing, the celebrations, and “the hallelujahs of a nation’s jubilee,” he experiences something else altogether:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. — The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.</p>
</blockquote>
Confronting yourself2020-07-04T20:14:27Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/confronting-yourself/<p>Here’s something distasteful I've noticed over the past few weeks: instead of folks saying “I am learning and growing”—being honest with their mistakes—a large number of people are just shouting constantly into the void of social media hell, desperately trying to prove that they're on the right side of history, that they’re fighting for the cause. From where I’m standing though, some part of it looks like people are trying to make themselves the hero. They’re not really confronting their own behavior.</p>
<p>But I reckon that this is the same for both BLM and the quarantine; ignoring our own mistakes seems like it only makes things worse.</p>
<p>So, I’ll go first: I’ve done and said racist things, I ignored the mask advice at the early stages, I got real mad about folks at the beach (even when the evidence suggests it’s one of the better activities we can do), I didn’t say “black lives matter” soon enough, I’ve not done enough for social justice causes, I didn’t read enough, I’ve not been paying enough attention in general. I didn’t write about it, I didn’t confront myself, and I certainly haven’t donated as much as I ought to.</p>
<p>I need to do oh-so-better in every way imaginable but I guess public apologies are somewhat grandstanding, too. Perhaps as I write this I’m contributing to the social media hell. But at the very least it’s honest and somewhat vulnerable to admit that screenshotting choice quotes is not as important as being critical of my own behavior. My own mistakes.</p>
<p>This is what establishes TikTok in my mind as the most important political platform right now (which is odd given that it’s a state-run social network). That’s because it feels like there’s some actual <em>work</em> being done over there. Folks are talking about their mistakes and talking about the fight for social injustice that feels so damn good—their phones pointing at themselves reflected in the bathroom mirror whilst they rant in a spoken-voice-honest-to-goodness-blogging sort of way. From everything I’ve seen so far in the TikTok community (god that makes me sound old), there’s this vulnerability that just isn’t present on any other platform. And it’s shocking that I’ve learnt more about this movement through TikTok than I have through Twitter or Instagram.</p>
<p>Perhaps this is all just a problem with who I’ve let into my feed though. I sort of bailed from Twitter and Instagram for weeks because of this, because White people specifically were in this battle for attention with each other—not with who can be the kindest or most critical of themselves, or sharing resources about how they’re learning about how best to support BLM. But instead they all want to be the fucking hero. Every White person suddenly acted as if they’d been involved with this fight since the beginning, as if they themselves founded the movement. And I’m sure I made that mistake, too. But now it feels like without recognizing my own mistakes that I’m co-opting a movement briefly for social clout. Or to appease my guilt.</p>
<p>That lack of self awareness is so distasteful to me. But maybe I’m wrong—maybe everything is helping and I’m just being critical when I shouldn’t be. I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing. But I think that humbling yourself before this thing is vital. I think it gives us the space to do the work; to become better people, to see the broken system we’re a part of and also benefit from, and to finally care for everyone in the ways that we should.</p>
Maps and Spreadsheets2020-07-04T19:38:45Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/maps-and-spreadsheets/<p>When it comes to design systems I don’t have many words of advice. I have <em>opinions</em> and <em>intense anxiety</em> but giving advice without context of the organization, the codebase, the people, is so very hard to do. But if there’s one word of advice that I keep learning, over and over again, and with almost every design systems project, is this: all design systems work should begin with a spreadsheet.</p>
<p>That’s because it naturally puts boundaries around the project, it defines this one small part of the hyperobject, and helps so you don’t fall down too many rabbit holes. Countless times I have found myself abandoning a project because I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. Instead of slowly tackling things as a checklist, I’ve jumped head first into the fray. And that almost always leads to disappointment of one kind of another. Eventually, without a trusty spreadsheet at my side, I find that I’ve broken too many tests and I can no longer see how much that I’ve changed. The project stalls, my enthusiasm wanes.</p>
<p>So when it comes to design systems, a spreadsheet is a map and guide, a breadcrumb trail through the bonkers state of things.</p>
Women In Music Pt.III2020-07-03T19:28:42Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/women-in-music-pt-iii/<p>The latest album by HAIM, <em>Women in Music Pt.III</em>, has been on infinite repeat for the last couple of days. Their music is like a fantastical broth between PJ Harvey, Shania Twain, and One Little Plane.</p>
<p>Also, they happen to be <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGILMne88AA">upsettingly good live</a> and earlier this year they made <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crZvtA9I4lY">the best music video of all time</a>. Ugh!</p>
Design Is [Multicultural]2020-07-02T00:08:34Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/design-is-multicultural/<p>Back in 2014 I was talking to a chap after a speaking gig in London and I had become the dictionary definition of <em>a big dumb mess.</em> I told him how I hadn’t slept the night before, how I was extremely nervous about the talk (which turned out very poorly in the end), and how I was starting to think the whole thing was a bad idea. This chap was speaking right after me (his talk was thoroughly lovely), and I was immediately inspired by how calm, collected, and thoughtful he was. He also gave me some very kind feedback. And so we haven’t kept in touch at all, I’m sure he wouldn’t recognize me today, but that one meeting all those years ago, that one impression, has remained so strongly in my memory.</p>
<p>This was my first impression of Senongo Akpem.</p>
<p>I remembered our brief chat yesterday when I stumbled across a talk of his about <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQEgWJDbXbc&feature=youtu.be">multicultural design</a> and now I can’t stop thinking about it. Throughout the talk he argues that when it comes to making mistakes in design, our intent doesn’t really matter all that much. If we made something that hurts people then that’s all that matters—the pain and damage is what counts, regardless of how <em>we</em> feel about it. And so to reduce the pain that we inflict we must reimagine what we think about other cultures, other ways of being a person in this world.</p>
<p>There’s a lot of great stories in here but the part that really stuck out to me was the one about the researcher asking folks in India about the design of a train ticket machine. She asked people how they might improve the UI but nobody would give her a conclusive answer. It was only when the researcher changed the scenario that folks started to care about this dumb little ticket machine and have opinions about how to make it better. It starts at around the <a href="https://youtu.be/XQEgWJDbXbc?t=540">9:00 mark</a> and that story alone is worth the price of admission.</p>
<p>In fact, I loved this talk so much so that I picked up <em><a href="https://abookapart.com/products/cross-cultural-design">Cross-Cultural Design</a></em>, Senongo’s book on the subject for A Book Apart. All of this is to say that I’m really excited to check it out because I feel like there’s so much left for me to learn on this subject.</p>
Being vulnerable in public2020-06-30T17:38:39Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/being-vulnerable-in-public/<p>At my previous gig, Slack channels were weird. No one would talk about the work; what was good, what was bad, what was difficult, what we could be doing better. Folks kept their work private.</p>
<p>So let’s say I was working on a refactoring project, I wouldn’t dare go into a channel and say “hey, I’m going to think out loud about this project for a bit as I’m refactoring this and y’all can give me feedback or just watch to learn more.” If I did that then people would just think that this is obnoxious, a waste of time, and quite frankly annoying. Or showing off perhaps. Or the sign of a junior designer and engineer. Because if you’re good then you must always know what the right course of action is, you must be stoic, and any sort of doubt or self-criticism must be a form of weakness, right?</p>
<p>Well, might I respectfully say: no! And also, subsequently, eff that!</p>
<p>Whenever I tried to show my work, or criticize an approach, or get into the nitty gritty details of a thing people would <em>hate</em> it. Instead, no-one was looking for real feedback. They were looking for emoji high fives and “great jobs!” or “heck yeah, my dude!” And it all seemed...so wrong to me. Fake, even. Condescending at best. Intellectually incestuous. Anything that deviated from positivity was seen as suspicious and mean.</p>
<p>But, as all toxic environments go, you get used to things. Through peer pressure you start to believe that this is just how the world works and that you’re a part of the problem. It took me <em>years</em> to see how fucked up this state of affairs was. All those lost hours of sleep, all those useless rants...</p>
<p>So when I joined <a href="https://sentry.io/">Sentry</a> I was shocked by how everyone uses Slack and email; everyone was blunt and talking about things that actually mattered. Everyone, even the founders of the company, were in channels talking about how to improve things, where we’ve gone wrong in the past. Everyone is trying to push the needle every day and you can <em>feel</em> it. Folks will criticize my designs or my code in a public channel, not in a mean way, but instead to push me forward and stand up for my ideas. To help me grow.</p>
<p>The other thing I noticed is how being dumb in public is extremely difficult. It probably has something to do with joining a company during the quarantine but I’d have to slide into a public channel and ask a ton of questions. This would then reveal how paralyzing, incomprehensibly dumb I can be at times. But I noticed how other people were doing the same thing; they would roll into a channel, ask a bunch of questions, get their answers, and then go fix whatever problem it was that they’re working on.</p>
<p>This is how a healthy company should look.</p>
<p>Yet this would’ve been impossible at my last job. No one would dare publicly say “I don’t know” because that would require vulnerability, honesty, a lack of ego. It would show that maybe you’re not the hero you think you are, that the company might not need you as much as you think. Anyway, I’ve been worrying a lot about this stuff for a while. About what makes for <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/a-vacuum-of-courage">a healthy workplace</a>, or how to avoid a toxic culture and <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/sick-systems">a sick system</a>, and how to <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/the-dashboard-problem">make good design possible</a>. Now I’m adding “being vulnerable in public” to that list as a top priority for any company that wants a healthy work environment.</p>
<p>And so if you run a company or a team today ask yourself this: could you go into any channel right now and ask a question, no matter how dumb it was? Would those replies be kind? Would it risk future promotions or upsetting people? Can you work in public?</p>
Raiders2020-06-26T22:57:16Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/raiders/<p>Umm...uhhh...there is an edit of <em>Raiders of the Lost Arc</em> by Steven Soderbergh and it is <a href="http://extension765.com/soderblogh/18-raiders">the single most perfect thing</a>. No greater, more perfectest thing has ever existed. It’s in black and white with the soundtrack from <em>The Social Network</em> thrown on top of it. Just go watch it.</p>
<p>Soderbergh also wrote about why he made this lovely and haunting edit:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m assuming the phrase “staging” came out of the theatre world, but it’s equally at home (and useful) in the movie world, since the term (roughly defined) refers to how all the various elements of a given scene or piece are aligned, arranged, and coordinated. In movies the role of editing adds something unique: the opportunity to extend and/or expand a visual (or narrative) idea to the limits of one’s imagination—a crazy idea that works today is tomorrow’s normal.</p>
<p>I value the ability to stage something well because when it’s done well its pleasures are huge, and most people don’t do it well, which indicates it must not be easy to master (it’s frightening how many opportunities there are to do something wrong in a sequence or a group of scenes. Minefields EVERYWHERE. Fincher said it: there’s potentially a hundred different ways to shoot something but at the end of the day there’s really only two, and one of them is wrong). Of course understanding story, character, and performance are crucial to directing well, but I operate under the theory a movie should work with the sound off, and under that theory, staging becomes paramount...</p>
</blockquote>
Utopia for Realists2020-06-26T05:06:17Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/utopia-for-realists/<p>Imagine a future made perfect. What would you fix? Think of all the ways our society could be made better, kinder. Well, I think the problem with all these wondrous futures and more perfect worlds is that they often make for not-so-lovely-books. Take <em>Sapiens</em> by Yuval Noah Harari, for example. Everyone reveres that book (and in San Francisco especially as it was the only book anyone read for a year at the very least). Ultimately, I agree with <a href="https://adactio.com/journal/14304">Jeremy’s notes</a> though.</p>
<p>But I find this to be true of almost any book in this genre; non-fiction books that outline a future for us all. A book of prophesy. A book with all the answers neatly summarized. I’m not sure what it is about reaching the bend of 30 years old that I find answers to be so very boring and incomplete. I find them all dreary and yawn-inducing, if not downright miserable. Nothing is inspiring, nothing hopeful. Or if they are hopeful then they’re in the camp of “give peace a chance” which, sure, but that’s just a lot of nothing.</p>
<p>This is why it was so shocking to me when I not only found myself enjoying Rutger Bregman’s <em>Utopia for Realists</em>, but adoring it entirely. It's a book that challenged me, pushed my ideas around, and really made me think about a future that is kinder. And what that word <em>kindness</em> means; not just a future for myself, but a future for everyone and in equal measure.</p>
<p>I won’t quote anything from the book because it’s worth reading it in its entirely but the point that Rutger makes over and over again is this: being poor is not a moral failure, but purely a lack of cash. And we can fix that; today <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ydKcaIE6O1k">poverty only exists in this world because we let it.</a></p>
Volume A2020-06-20T04:11:14Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/volume-a/<p>Okay! Since I mentioned that the Kindle is <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/the-punk-rock-essay-machine">a punk rock essay machine</a> I’ve started to wonder...what if I gathered a bunch of my favorite posts from <em><a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/adventures/">Adventures</a></em>, bundled them up into a Kindle book and donated all the proceeds to charity? It would help me learn how ebooks really work under the hood, plus I could punch up some of my writing a bit, and of course maybe help some folks in the process.</p>
<p>I already have a working title: <em>Adventures in Typography: Volume A</em>. Which is funny, because there would probably not be any other volumes to this thing. And the cover design? Well, it had me scouring the web for this old post on <a href="https://seths.blog/2009/07/the-purpose-of-a-book-cover/">the purpose of book covers</a> by Seth Godin:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Is the purpose of the cover to sell books, to accurately describe what's in the book, or to tee up the reader so the book has maximum impact?</p>
<p>The third.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dave called this whole thing <a href="https://twitter.com/davatron5000/status/1273728893376233476">a bootleg .mobi</a>, which of course I love. Except instead of me selling these things out of the back of my car in a parking lot outside a pub, I would just be selling it on Amazon dot com whilst I sit on my butt and play <em>The Last of Us: Part II</em> until my eyes bleed.</p>
<p>Anyway, the whole thing would be $5. But would folks be interested in this? I’m not sure. It’s always been difficult (as I assume it is for writers of every ilk) to ask for money for this kind of writing. Does it have any value?</p>
<p>Screw it, I’ll just go make it. Now here comes the first question though: how the eff do I make a book?</p>
The Punk Rock Essay Machine2020-06-18T16:09:15Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-punk-rock-essay-machine/<p>Arguments, political pamphlets, essays about civil rights; the longer I look at the Kindle this time around the more I see it as the perfect little punk rock essay machine. Sure, a lot of <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/essays/in-search-of-the-long-wow">what I said about the Kindle</a> is still true. But now I feel like this thing has been designed to radicalize me, a pamphlet thrown in my hand on a street corner, asking that I change how I vote.</p>
<p>Maybe it’s just because of what I’ve been reading lately as of course this thing most certainly wasn’t designed to be a platform for essays and what not. It appears that from all the ads I see it was designed instead to sell me as many cheap and easy going novels as it possibly can. But reading novels or longer texts on the Kindle doesn’t feel as satisfying for reasons that I find difficult to point to. But an essay? A very long blog post? That’s the sweet spot for the Kindle! No images, no animations, nothing but pure, unfiltered argument.</p>
<p>I guess I should write something for this thing, huh. Maybe I’ll do that when I have an idea for a longer essay-like thing.</p>
<p>(P.S. the first thing you should do on the Kindle is turn off justification because the first rule of good typesetting is that if you don’t have the time to manually adjust justification by hand—making sure some lines are scrunched together whilst other words are spaced s u p e r far apart—then it’s not worth doing at all. Hmrph!)</p>
So You Want to Talk About Race2020-06-18T03:30:26Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/so-you-want-to-talk-about-race/<p>I just started reading Ijeoma Oluo’s ever so excellent book <em>So You Want to Talk About Race</em>. Her writing is laser-focused and this bit in particular where Ijeoma compares white supremacy to an abusive relationship jolted me awake:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When I was in an abusive relationship, it was not just about one incident [...] before I knew what was happening, I’d be on the defensive, trying to defend my right to a relationship free of abuse. [...] But whenever I tried to step back and look at the big picture, he’d pull me down to look at a tiny piece: “See this? It’s so small. Why would you get upset about this little thing?” I could not address abuse in my relationship because I was too busy defending my right to even call it abuse.</p>
<p>Often, being a person of color in white-dominated society is like being in an abusive relationship with the world. Every day is a new little hurt, a new little dehumanization. We walk around flinching, still in pain from the last hurt and dreading the next. But when we say “this is hurting us,” a spotlight is shown on the freshest hurt, the bruise just forming: “Look how small it is, and I’m sure there is a good reason for it. Why are you making such a big deal about it? Everyone gets hurt from time to time”—while the world ignores that the rest of our bodies are covered in scars.</p>
</blockquote>
Out of Reach2020-06-17T17:55:55Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/out-of-reach/<p>There’s a line in <em>Close to the Machine</em> where Ellen Ullman is writing about technology and the future, and there’s an image that I haven’t been able to shake in all the years since I read her book:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The future. Right again. The new: irresistible, like it or not.</p>
<p>But I didn’t like it. I was parting ways with it. And right at that moment, I had a glimpse of the great, elusive edge of technology. I was surprised to see that it looked like a giant cosmic Frisbee. It was yellow, rotating at a great rate, and was slicing off into the universe, away from me.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Technology as a toy, always moving away from you, always out of reach.</p>
In Praise of the Walking Coffee2020-06-17T17:32:44Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/in-praise-of-the-walking-coffee/<p><a href="https://www.grubstreet.com/2020/05/in-praise-of-the-walking-coffee.html">Rachel Sugar</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Walking doesn’t improve the taste of coffee, but coffee improves the experience of being in the world. It blunts the harsher edges. Without coffee, there is “public space” and “private space.” With coffee, the whole city is your living room.</p>
<p>Usually, I think only rich people and babies get to blur these sorts of boundaries. Babies get security blankets; rich people get status sweatpants. The rest of us are supposed to generally contain ourselves.</p>
<p>Walking coffee is the exception. Walking coffee is its own kind of security blanket. You don’t even have to drink it, really; just holding the coffee is enough. What matters is not the coffee but the possibility of coffee. With walking coffee in your hand, you are the master of your destiny.</p>
</blockquote>
Homesick2020-06-15T15:49:09Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/homesick/<p>Good morning! Today I'm homesick. Although it is most certainly weird to use that word, <em>home</em>, when speaking of the UK so I'm not sure what would be a better an alternative.</p>
<p>I just miss it all like hell.</p>
<p>I miss dark pubs in the Westcountry and the radioactive smell of vinegar on fish and chips. I miss the brooding skies and the seagulls and the knife-like winds, the mean jokes between friends. I miss my self-destructive, racist family and I miss the London Underground. I miss the...okay maybe I don’t miss much about Plymouth at all. But England, as an idea, as a concept, is something I long for.</p>
<p>I know I have an odd relationship with the UK. It’s always been a place that I’m running away from, a place to abandon in the middle of the night. Especially with Brexit where I fundamentally disagree with almost everyone about the subject. And those that I do happen to agree with are far too scared to fight for what’s right, for what is just. God it still makes me so angry that I want to tear up my passport and say good riddance.</p>
<p>Unrelatedly, I miss how stubborn British people are. I miss how everything is terrible all the time and everyone knows it. I miss cobblestone paths and red brick buildings and being entirely alone and sad in London. I fondly miss the way British people cuss; a magic power that only they can wield.</p>
<p>I suppose that’s one of many reasons that leaving the UK was a good idea. Now I can return with a map in hand, casually dropping American slang everywhere I go as my Westcountry accent slowly fades and I become a tourist in my own home.</p>
Remember My Song2020-06-15T01:47:31Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/labi-siffre/<p>In his newsletter, <a href="https://jezburrows.com/enthusiasm/">Dept. of Enthusiasm</a>, Jez mentioned Labi Siffre’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a25L_FZgEr4">Remember My Song</a> which I had never heard before. It’s been playing in the background whilst I cook this evening and it’s just so very perfect.</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/a25L_FZgEr4" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
Dream Wiki2020-06-13T19:33:25Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/dream-wiki/<p>I found out about <a href="https://dreamwiki.sixey.es/welcome.dream/">Dream Wiki</a> through Kicks Condor’s <a href="https://www.kickscondor.com/">surreal blog</a> and damn is this just what I meant about making websites <em>weird</em>. I have no idea who made this “GARDEN OF ASSOCIATIVE THOUGHT SLURRY COMBINED FIELD NOTES-CAREFULLY GROWN.” Just...what?</p>
<p>From what I can understand so far this website is a sort of lucid dream, a weird wiki of inconclusive definitions, a drunk dictionary. Take the definition for <a href="https://dreamwiki.sixey.es/calls.dream/">birds</a>, for example:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>ENVELOP ME IN NOISE... A SANDSTORM OF SOUND... AND SURE ENOUGH, BETWEEN THE GRAINS THERE ARE CALLS FROM OTHER WORLDS. DISTANT WAILING SIRENS, COMING CLOSER BUT STAYING OUT OF REACH... TELLING ME THAT SOMETHING IS HAPPENING, PERFUMING ME WITH SOMEONE ELSES EXCITEMENT.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is bonkers, reading like something straight out of the manic and deranged parts of <a href="https://buttondown.email/robinrendle/archive/7b8029d3-220c-4f88-9d4b-13e748c632ba">Disco Elysium</a>. Also! Each time you refresh the page it changes the theme and the use of punctuation on the sides is randomly generated, too:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/dream-wiki.png" alt="Screenshots of the Dream Wiki website" /></p>
The Lonely City2020-06-13T19:21:09Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-lonely-city/<p>I’ve been struggling to read for quite some time as my focus can barely hold on long enough to grasp a paragraph or two. And this is only made worse by a crush; a few weeks ago I started flirting with someone that I’ve known for a decade (I’ve read everything she’s ever written) and so when we started talking she recommended a string of upsettingly lovely books to me.</p>
<p>I rolled my eyes and groaned loudly as she did because I knew what would happen; in an attempt to woo her I would pick them all up, I would read every single damn one of them in hope of learning who this distant person really is and what makes her tick, what she sees in books and novels and writing. Is there some great topic that I missed? Is there a novelist or writer that I’ve never heard of who I’ll be obsessed with thanks to her?</p>
<p>So now every surface in my apartment, from floor to ceiling, is doused in books because I am an idiot.</p>
<p>Anyway, after about three weeks of stops and starts, desperately trying to resettle my focus, I just finished Olivia Laing’s <em>The Lonely City</em> and it’s quite lovely. Although, I feel like it’s the sort of book that should be half its size because then it would be non-stop club bangers the whole way through, but even then the slowish parts are worth holding on for. Any who, <em>The Lonely City</em> is a collection of essays about loneliness and how art can help us fight off those feelings of self loathing and abandonment.</p>
<p>For example, Olivia writes of her experience with Twitter:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the first year or two that I was there it felt like a community, a joyful place; a lifeline, in fact, considering how cut off I otherwise was. At other times, though, the whole thing seemed insane, a trading-off of time against nothing tangible at all: a yellow star, a magic bean, a simulacrum of intimacy, for which I was surrendering all the pieces of my identity, every element except the physical carcass in which I was supposedly contained. And it only took a few missed connections or lack of likes for the loneliness to resurface, to be flooded with the bleak sense of having failed to make contact.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Or her experience of moving to New York:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...the way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or by falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing by way of this contact the fact that loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive.</p>
</blockquote>
Subtle Optical Phenomenons2020-06-12T21:13:16Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/subtle-optical-phenomenon/<p>In a post I wrote a while back about <a href="https://css-tricks.com/dark-mode-and-variable-fonts/">dark mode and variable fonts</a>, Gerhard Großmann made this rather lovely comment:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In typography it’s well known that luminous letters on dark backgrounds tend to look bolder. Unfortunately I know the technical term only in German – „Überstrahlung“, which could be translated as blooming or flare. If somebody knows the English term, please comment! I found a good explanation of this effect in a German article about legibility on computer screens. My translation of the relevant part: “Bright areas outshine (flare/bloom into) darker ones, so that a bright background eats away dark letters from the outside and the font seems to be less bold – vice versa bright text seems to be bolder on dark backgrounds.” Besides on computer screens this effect occurs on luminous or reflective road signage, too [...]. It’s also helpful to slightly (!) letter-space white text on black backgrounds. As always in typography there’s more than one possibility to compensate the numerous subtle optical phenomenons.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>Subtle. Optical. Phenomenons.</em> Heck yes.</p>
Shout shout shout2020-06-12T16:37:19Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/shout-shout-shout/<p>My pal Lucy Bellwood jotted down some notes about being <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/show-your-work-38037938">patient with yourself</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The impulse to fix fix fix work work work shout shout shout until it all gets done in one breathless swoop is strong. But I think it's the same impulse that tells me I can only draw a graphic novel if I sit down on a Monday and refuse to lift my backside from the chair until I’ve drawn 250 pages in a single go. It won’t end well.</p>
<p>The lesson I’ve learned in my creative practice is that my "success" is far more reliant on the systems I use to gently hold myself accountable over time. Staying in it for the long haul requires an ongoing sense of accomplishment—however minuscule. It also requires restraint. Only then, gradually and in an entirely un-linear fashion, can it grow into something transformative.</p>
</blockquote>
8 minutes and 46 seconds2020-06-12T15:24:36Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/8-minutes-and-46-seconds/<p>Dave Chappelle’s latest show on the murder of George Floyd, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tR6mKcBbT4">8:46</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...he’s not a hero and why does the black community make him a hero? Why do you choose him as a hero? WE didn’t choose him, YOU did. They killed him and that wasn’t right, so he’s the guy. We’re not desperate for heroes in the black community—anyone that survives this nightmare is my goddamned hero.</p>
</blockquote>
2D Websites2020-06-12T04:00:33Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/2d-websites/<p>I guess I’m feeling a bit nostalgic this evening. Or perhaps nostalgic is not the right word, maybe confused instead. That’s because I’m on the lookout for new blogs and websites, and I’m stumbling upon a few common patterns; portfolios and single page bio websites. You know the sort. The single line description, the link to other platforms, the emoji that might be animated slightly.</p>
<p>These are the business cards of the Internet. And they’re so utterly boring to me.</p>
<p>When I log onto someone’s website I want them to tell me why they’re <em>weird</em>. Where’s the journal or scrapbook? Where’s your stamp collection? Or the works-in-progress, the failed attempts, the clunky unfinished things? Instead, we find websites that are squeaky clean; minimalist layouts with circle avatars and sans-serif type. These websites can’t have any flaws, or embarrassing posts found lurking within their depths, or unpolished ancient ideas that suggest critical thinking of a subject and development over time.</p>
<p>I guess that’s what I’m looking for tonight; websites that have <em>depth</em>. The sort of website you can throw away a whole afternoon exploring someone’s work, imagining what this distant life must be like.</p>
Between the Third and Fifth Apology2020-06-10T15:27:36Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/between-the-third-and-fifth-apology/<p>“I’m sorry,” I repeat for the sixth or maybe even the seventh time. The bespectacled figure on the video tilts his head, looks up from his notes at me. Somewhere between the third and fifth apology I notice that he has all the discipline of timeless and inanimate matter; he doesn’t get uncomfortable no matter how paralyzing the silence becomes. But I must fill the space, because it’s me: “I am...uhhh...,” I laugh nervously. “...I’m extremely sorry.” I say once again, for good measure.</p>
<p>After a prolonged beat—nations rise and fall, the Anthropocene is washed away by centuries of bombardment by wind and rain only until the passage of time itself comes to a crashing halt because the heat death of the universe has fizzled out until all of us are absolute nothing—my therapist finally replies: “Why are you sorry?”</p>
<hr />
<p>This week I had my first real go at this stuff. My therapist’s voice is upsettingly calm and collected, whereas I’m just this live-wire of nerves, or sometimes I’m just a guilty pile of clothes on the floor, and then out of nowhere this wild, uncontrollable, unfathomable loneliness and anger and self-loathing comes rushing towards me from all directions.</p>
<p>I probably shouldn’t write about this stuff, huh.</p>
<p>I’ve tried the whole distant-not-talking-about-it-thing, I’ve tried speaking with friends and people I love. I’ve tried writing about it, ignoring it, hiding from it, working out until I can no longer physically have emotions or calories left over to spend thinking about it.</p>
<p>But none of it worked. So: therapy.</p>
<p>If I’m honest I’ve been struggling for a while. Two years ago I started therapy but it felt like yet another unhealthy relationship I had to juggle, a performance for me to enact or a weekly show that I put on for a stranger’s entertainment. I would spend the whole session making jokes because I couldn’t talk honestly about whatever it was that bothered me.</p>
<p>That’s why I was so damn hesitant to start again; therapy didn’t work last time so why would it now? But JB shouted at me and then shouted at me some more. Ali and Tori eventually joined the chorus of shouting. (I hate friendship). But I also love my friends, so that’s why I’m doing this, mostly to stop the shouting.</p>
<p>But all these weird feelings that I have about therapy are difficult to pinpoint. They probably stem from the intense toxic masculinity, the racism, the xenophobia and homophobia of my childhood home. Because therapy in my mind is still a form of weakness. It means that I’m not a man, that I’m simply incapable of being naturally confident or sane and so I shouldn’t bother trying. With all these feelings of guilt it comes down to this: I feel too broken for therapy to help.</p>
<p>(I know that’s not true but that’s how I feel. I’m working on it.)</p>
<p>Now things have gotten so desperate that I need someone’s help. But perhaps this time I’ll have more discipline. And maybe I’ll hold off on the jokes. And even the apologies.</p>
<p>Nope, scratch that. I will always be sorry!</p>
<p>Sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry.</p>
8 to Abolition2020-06-08T04:34:50Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/8-to-abolition/<p>Reading over the <a href="https://www.8toabolition.com/">8 to Abolition</a> website made me gasp this morning because I had never even considered a world without police:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The end goal of these reforms is not to create better, friendlier, or more community-oriented police or prisons. Instead, we hope to build toward a society without police or prisons, where communities are equipped to provide for their safety and wellbeing.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The prison industrial complex is an evil stain across this country but it’s bonkers that I’ve never even considered a world without police. Before reading this site, I had not even once considered whether the police as an organization <em>should</em> exist. I just assumed they must, like oxygen.</p>
<p>It’s so rare for me to encounter something like that—not just new information, but a whole new thread of ideas. A vast network of arguments to have, of threads to follow. As many have noted on Twitter however, these ideas aren’t new, <a href="https://twitter.com/aworkinglibrary/status/1269742437267841025">as Mandy says</a>: “because you didn’t see their work doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.”</p>
<p>So I have an awful lot of catching up to do.</p>
<p>Anyway, all of these steps seem extremely reasonable but—question!—why is an outright ban on personal firearms not one of these steps? Perhaps I’m missing something, as by far the scariest part of moving to America for me was watching regular cops stroll down the street with guns on their hips. In the UK the police are frightening, sure, but there’s not that same hum of violence as there is here in America.</p>
This Extraordinary Being2020-06-07T17:00:38Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/this-extraordinary-being/<p>This week I was reminded with a big, thundering <em>oomph</em> that the sixth episode of HBO’s The Watchmen, <em>This Extraordinary Being</em>, is some of the finest television I’ve ever seen. The focus of this episode is inherited pain, the idea that it can be passed on from generation to generation. And at the heart of all this pain is a virus called white supremacy.</p>
<p>I won’t spoil anything more than that because this episode rewrites The Watchmen comic and if you haven’t read it then I highly recommend you would before you start the show. I watched it with my roommate not so long ago, who hadn’t read the comic, and afterwards she was so baffled by what she’d seen that I began to appreciate the show even more. The fact that not only would it have the courage to say “absolutely not, fuck white supremacy” but also to rewrite the intent and themes of the graphic novel without providing any hand holding to the folks who don’t know what this world is all about...just...woah.</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<figure>
<img loading="lazy" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/abar.jpg" alt="The Watchmen" />
</figure>
</div>
<p>I love this episode for so many reasons; the dad stuff, the confrontation of racism, the black and white saturation, the way the camera stops and stutters through time. In one moment a baby is born and in his mother’s arms, and as she carries him behind a door frame he’s suddenly a young boy. People age and get younger, characters return from the far future, and in the background the protagonist’s dead mother is constantly playing piano. Even the camera is haunted; it floats around this space watching each character ominously. Speaking of which, this whole episode reminds me of <em>A Ghost Story</em> in that way.</p>
<p>It also reminds me of <em>The Fire Next Time</em>, a book I’ve been thinking about all week. It’s a collection of essays from James Baldwin and one of them is a letter he sent to his nephew in 1963, the anniversary of one hundred years of emancipation. And in it, he writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon.</p>
</blockquote>
41 Shots2020-06-06T17:26:04Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/41-shots/<p>This cover of Springsteen’s 41 Shots by Living Colour is heartbreaking and worthy of every second of your attention today. Goddamn.</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/MiC68406c3M" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
Growing and Learning2020-06-05T19:34:23Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/growing-and-learning/<p>A couple of years ago I was at a cafe and someone dropped a plate on the floor. Half a second after it exploded they shouted “I AM GROWING AND LEARNING” and I still think about it everyday.</p>
<p>Anyway, during this quarantine there’s so very much that I’m learning about myself, such as:</p>
<ul>
<li>Man, I really need people. Like wow, I thought I was very independent and about as close as you could get to a social pariah but not seeing anyone for months now and being trapped in my apartment entirely alone is breaking me up, reorganizing my thoughts in unhealthy ways. (Yesterday a neighbor I barely speak to chatted with me, or rather <em>at</em> me, from her porch and sorta kinda made me feel even worse about this, guilting me into not chatting with them all outside, and I hate that I’m not closer to the community in this neighborhood. But also that’s just not me? I dunno.)</li>
<li>I’m not the writer that I thought I was: I always wanted to be the chap that makes you cry—the one that writes a giant novel that breaks apart their audience and reconstructs them from absolute nothing. But after years of trying that I see now that it’s just...not me either. I’m not in the Orwell camp of writers, I’m in camp Wodehouse. And I would probably do well to remember that.</li>
<li>I need to write every day. If I don’t I go completely loopy it seems. Things start to matter less, I start to hate myself, and here is a third thing.</li>
<li>I tend to put folks up on a pedastal and when I inevitably disappoint them it ruins me. Years ago I met a professor at Reading University and whenever he talked to you it was like you were enveloped in the beam of a giant lighthouse—a great BOOM of attention and loveliness, focused entirely on you—and when he looked away it was like nothing mattered any more. People were terrified of him. And one day, the last day I would ever see him, he came over to my work that was on display. A casual glance around it. And then he caught sight of something: the print catalogue I had worked on. He got up close to it, adjusted his glasses, and whispered: “Wondrous!” And it is probably the best I’ve ever felt in my life. But also this is bad for me. Maybe. Because I always chase that feeling, that thrill of impressing someone that is un-impressible and this might explain something about my romantic life that I do not care to admit.</li>
<li>I’ve always looked out for people that reveal their vulnerabilities. There’s something courageous about that to me. It’s easy to buy a leather jacket and smoke cigarettes but fuck me is it hard to say something interesting and insightful and honest in a way that just isn’t for soaking up attention.</li>
<li>I should probably learn to cook more meals. There’s a tiny string of meals I cook endlessly on a loop because I don’t want the hassle of thinking about it. Cooking for one just feels wrong, I guess. Now if there was someone frightening with me that was extremely hard to impress...</li>
<li>I should probably drink less coffee.</li>
</ul>
The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action2020-06-05T16:04:08Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/silence-into-language-and-action/<p>Cassie sent me this pdf the other day, <a href="https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/images/2017/12/silenceintoaction.pdf">an excerpt of <em>Sister Outsider</em></a> by Audre Lorde (which I need to pick up immediately) and I really can’t stop thinking about it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I can't possibly teach Black women's writing—their experience is so different from mine.” Yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another, “She's a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?” Or, “She's a lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?” Or again, “This woman writes of her sons and I have no children.” And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other.</p>
<p>We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.</p>
<p>The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.</p>
</blockquote>
The Apparatus2020-05-31T17:36:52Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-apparatus/<p>Still enslaved to a white man, Frederick Douglass is climbing to the top of a hill. After some time he reaches the very top where he now has a vantage of the whole bay—beneath him the ships are rolling into the dock with piercing white sails, men are unloading the boats and setting up wagons in the town, and high above him the clouds are swaying back and forth in the currents; leaves attached to invisible, celestial branches.</p>
<p>It was this moment in the <em>Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave</em> that I was starting to see that the most horrifying thing about slavery and racism isn’t the violence alone. Although obviously shocking and horrible to any sound mind, it is something else that Douglass was horrified by. He is watching how the landscape has been terraformed by white men, rebuilt in their image. He shows us the whole speechless other-thing of racism; at the top of the hill he is looking at the engine of the economy and he lifts the curtain to reveal that every cog inside is a black body being ground into dust.</p>
<p>Reading Douglass’s autobiography as a white man and at the age of 16 I could somewhat <em>imagine</em> the madness and cruelty of slavery—although it would take me many, many years to see the effects of Britain’s empire and its vast evil—but I couldn’t grasp this other-unidentifiable-thing that Douglass was desperately trying to show me. He had spent his entire life pointing at it, this unstoppable racist engine. And more than a century later I was reading his thoughts in my bedroom, catapulted backwards through time, trying to follow along and clearly see what he was showing me, forcing myself to imagine the pure unending horror of this nameless other-thing.</p>
<p>That other-thing, what I think of now as the apparatus of racism, was what Douglass and so many others had pointed at, fought against, and died trying to give us a brief glimpse of. And now perched at the top of a hill, sitting under those leafy clouds, Douglass was holding our hand and making it visible; <em>not all evil is violence</em>, he is telling us. <em>It’s in the bricks and the mortar, it’s in the railroads and the shipping lines, buried in the cities and the network of highways connecting them, it’s etched in the foundation of each and every building—bungalow, factory, and capitol.</em></p>
<p>It was all built in support of this other-thing, the apparatus that we cannot see. And now I know that as a white man I will never fully see it, no matter how much Douglass tries to show me. But that doesn’t mean I should give up, it only means that I should try even harder to see it.</p>
<p>And then somehow work towards destroying it.</p>
Wanted everyone to feel welcome2020-05-26T16:53:35Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/wanted-everyone-to-feel-welcome/<p>Over on the NYT, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/24/us/us-coronavirus-deaths-100000.html">An Incalculable Loss</a> is equal parts beautiful and horrific. It says a giant “fuck you” to the charts and statistics and shows everyone that’s died so far during the pandemic in a way that’s entirely heartbreaking.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One hundred thousand. A number is an imperfect measure when applied to the human condition. A number provides an answer to how many, but it can never convey the individual arcs of life, the 100,000 ways of greeting the morning and saying good night.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Each person comes with a description of their lives, a small sentence that breaks the mold of that chart that we’re now so familiar with, the one that peaks up and to the right. Instead, this sentence show us the people that “loved creating perfect smiles,” and the “first black woman to graduate from Harvard Law School,” the “family jokester,” and, heartbreakingly, the person that “wanted everyone to feel welcome.”</p>
Newsletters vs. Ye Olde Blog2020-05-25T01:10:29Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/newsletters-vs-ye-olde-blog/<p>I think the weird thing about newsletters is that they’re so...<em>formal</em>. It would make for a cruel and unusual punishment if I sent an email out to a bunch of people that was nonsensical, doesn’t conclude properly, doesn’t have some sense of progress or I-don’t-know-what. But with a blog post? I don’t care!</p>
<p>In fact, that’s the graceful thing about blogs and personal sites. They can be just for you; scribbling down notes in a public but non-important way. It doesn’t have to lead anywhere, and there doesn’t have to be this big pretense that you’re the smartest person in the room.</p>
<p>A blog post can start in the middle of nothing, go nowhere, and then just...</p>
Text for Proofing Fonts2020-05-25T00:57:38Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/text-for-proofing-fonts/<p>Type designers often use pangrams (a sentence with every letter of the alphabet in it) to design their letters and “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” is undoubtedly the most famous. It’s supposed to be an easy way to see if every letter of the alphabet fits with all the others.</p>
<p>But in <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/text-for-proofing-fonts">Text for Proofing Fonts</a>, Jonathan Hoefler argues against that one in particular:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In years past, our proofs were full of pangrammatic foxes and lynxes and the rest, which made for some very merry reading. But invariably, I’d find myself staring down a lowercase J — and if I questioned the amount of space assigned to its left side, I’d set off in search of some confirmation in the proof. Each time, I’d be reminded that while pangrams delivered all kinds of jocks and japes and jutes and judges, even our prodigious list featured not a single word with a J in the middle.¹1 The letter J, rare in English to begin with, tends to appear in the company of familiar prefixes or suffixes. To the pangrammer, everyday words like conjunction, injurious or subjective are wasteful, because they burn too many commonplace letters in support of a single curio. Therefore jowl, jib, and the highly suspect jynx. For a time, I thought the mid-word J in my ‘Veljović’ pangram might help, but quickly discovered that in all capitals, the unfittable pair LJ is spectacularly distracting. I sympathize with the typographers of Ljubljana. I also started to notice that Xs had an unusually strong affinity for Ys in pangrams, because pangrams make a sport of concision. Words like foxy and oxygen deliver real bang for your buck if you’re out to craft a compact sentence, but to the typeface designer noticing that the pair XY looks consistently wrong, none of these words will reveal which letter is at fault. I’d find myself rewriting the pangrams, popping in an occasional ‘doxology’ to see if the X was balanced between round letters, or ‘dynamo’ to review the Y between flat ones.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>His example that replaces pangrams are interesting because it gives us a bit of insight into how type designers see letters and it also shows us the mad, complex logic that is required to build such letters.</p>
Lubalin’s Logotypes2020-05-23T16:28:10Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/lubalin%E2%80%99s-logotypes/<blockquote>
<p>Herb Lubalin and his studios created a vast number of logos over the years. In a career that spanned over 40 years, Lubalin easily created over a hundred marks. Some were corporate logos, some were for non-profits, some were merely tight lock-ups that could act as titles on books, or seen on ads. The range is pretty spectacular.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>No kidding. This is a great website that’s dedicated to <a href="https://readymag.com/flatfile/11-logotypes/">Herb Lubalin’s work</a> and showcases some of the charming logotypes he made over that time. Also! After clicking around Flat File site for a bit I spotted <a href="https://readymag.com/flatfile/01-fact/intro/">this post</a> and I like how they’ve added a tiny camera icon to reveal who the person is in the story. I always get a bit excited whenever I see novel ways to hypertext.</p>
<p>Oh and this also reminds me of the story about <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/the-first-floor">Herb Lubalin and the first floor</a>.</p>
Another use case for variable fonts2020-05-23T16:03:02Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/another-use-case-for-variable-fonts/<p>There’s a lot of nifty things you can do with variable fonts. You can make <a href="https://css-tricks.com/dark-mode-and-variable-fonts/">small design adjustments</a>, or you can get a bunch of performance benefits...<em>kinda</em>. If you load a giant variable font with a ton of different axes then your users are going to have a bad time. But! Loading one font like Newzald.woff2 is likely going to be faster than loading Newzald-bold.woff2, Newzald-italic.woff2, Newzald-regular.woff2, etc. Lots of folks like <a href="https://codepen.io/collection/XqRLMb/">Mandy Michael</a> have written a ton of stuff about this before so I won’t retread those thoughts.</p>
<p>But what if we could combine fonts together easily? So say we have a display font (Display.woff2) and it has one weight we want to use for our headings. Then we have a body text font (Body.woff2) and it has multiple styles—italic, bold, regular, etc. Instead of loading two separate fonts here it would be great to combine two very different type families into a single file (Project.woff2) (and I’m imagining an interface similar to ImageOptim here for some reason).</p>
<p>I <a href="https://twitter.com/robinrendle/status/1245066797897809921">mentioned this</a> not so long ago and <a href="https://twitter.com/NickSherman/status/1245082954579263492">Nick Sherman replied</a> that <a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/otff#collections">OpenType Collections</a> are designed for just this very thing.</p>
<p>Nifty! I’ll be sure to dig into that at one point or another.</p>
Blogging should be easy2020-05-23T05:35:58Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/blogging-should-be-easy/<p>I wish blogging was easier. I reckon that 95% of the reason why people don’t write more on the Internet, on their own little spot with their own URL, is that it’s just a <em>pain</em>.</p>
<p>The other day <a href="https://twitter.com/TejasKumar_/status/1262678746298974209">Tejas Kumar showed</a> just how easy it is to publish a website today (really, I think this whole drag and drop thing is outstanding and I love that it’s easy to use Netlify to effectively “retweet” a website with their little button) but to make a simple blog post still feels like an enormous pain to me.</p>
<p>Today my setup is:</p>
<ol>
<li>Write a thing in iAWriter.</li>
<li>Use <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/improving-my-workflow">my Alfred extension</a> to open up a new file VSCode.</li>
<li>Use iTerm to push that .md file as a commit to GitHub.</li>
<li>GitHub then automatically deploys to Netlify.</li>
</ol>
<p>It looks like <a href="https://ia.net/writer">iA Writer</a> now supports <a href="https://indieweb.org/Micropub">Micropub</a> and I haven’t dug into it all yet but I think I could use this along with some Netlify Function trickery to publish a blog post to GitHub straight from iAWriter.</p>
<p>I wonder if for now instead of spending all evening figuring this out I could just work it out with <a href="https://www.netlifycms.org/">Netlify CMS</a>. This will let me login to something like <a href="http://robinrendle.com/login">robinrendle.com/login</a>, input a user name and password, and then write things without the need to have my environment ready. Ideally it should let me publish quick notes from my phone, too.</p>
<p>Okay, <a href="https://www.netlifycms.org/docs/add-to-your-site/">let’s go</a>!</p>
<p>First up I need to make a directory called <code>/admin</code> and create two files in it: <code>config.yml</code> and <code>index.html</code>. Easy.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The first file, <code>admin/index.html</code>, is the entry point for the Netlify CMS admin interface.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And that ends up looking like this:</p>
<pre><code><!doctype html>
<html lang="en>
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8" />
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
<title>Content Manager</title>
</head>
<body>
<!-- Include the script that builds the page and powers Netlify CMS -->
<script src="https://unpkg.com/netlify-cms@^2.0.0/dist/netlify-cms.js"></script>
</body>
</html>
</code></pre>
<p>Next step is to update the <code>config.yml</code> with some data like:</p>
<pre><code>backend:
name: git-gateway
branch: master
</code></pre>
<p>Looks like I need to setup something else for drafting files and what not but I’m gonna ignore that for now. What next?</p>
<p>Okay so I have to add my media folder – that’s at the root of my repo and it’s called <code>/uploads</code>. So my <code>config.yml</code> now looks like this:</p>
<pre><code>backend:
name: git-gateway
branch: master
media_folder: "uploads"
</code></pre>
<p>So this is where things get a bit trickier—seems like I need to tell Netlify CMS about all of the fields that make up a blog post: the title, the body, the metadata, etc. I can do that like this:</p>
<pre><code>collections:
- name: "notes"
label: "Notes"
folder: "_posts"
create: true
slug: "---"
template, e.g., YYYY-MM-DD-title.md
fields:
- {label: "Title", name: "title", widget: "string"}
- {label: "Publish Date", name: "date", widget: "datetime"}
- {label: "City", name: "city", widget: "string"}
- {label: "Country", name: "country", widget: "string"}
- {label: "Tag", name: "tag", widget: "string" }
- {label: "Body", name: "body", widget: "markdown"}
</code></pre>
<p>We’ll see if that works. Last time it didn’t, but I was too lazy to debug why.</p>
<p>Now it appears that all I have to do is tell Netlify how to authenticate things with their Identity service. I am clicking things on the website but nothing really makes a lick of sense to me.</p>
<p>After doing that I need to add a script to the <code>header.html</code> partial of my main site and the admin <code>index.html</code>. This is the “front-end interface” of the login page I’ll need to use the CMS. I understand what all of this means, too. In case you were wondering.</p>
<p>Is this gonna have any performance impact for folks? No clue. I’ll need to double check that after I sort this out.</p>
<p>That basically wraps things up. Can I access the CMS via my local environment? Let’s test. Hmmm...heading to <code>localhost:8080/admin</code> doesn’t work. Let me push this code live and see what happens. No one hack my site whilst I’m doing this, thanks.</p>
<p>Ugh on this laptop I still haven’t fixed my GitHub password authentication via iTerm. I’ll leave that. I’ve had a long day. I’m just gonna get some tea and wait the 3 mins it takes for Netlify to deploy.</p>
<p>Okay, site deployed and tea acquired! Let’s head to <code>robinrendle.com/admin</code> and see what happens...dang. I got this message:</p>
<pre><code>Error loading the CMS configuration
Config Errors:
Error: Failed to load config.yml (404)
Check your config.yml file.
</code></pre>
<p>Somehow I effed up the config. Lemme take a look... Huh. I forgot to edit my <code>footer.html</code> partial, as the docs says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When a user logs in with the Netlify Identity widget, an access token directs to the site homepage. In order to complete the login and get back to the CMS, redirect the user back to the /admin/ path. To do this, add the following script before the closing body tag of your site's main index page:<em></em></p>
</blockquote>
<pre><code></script>
if (window.netlifyIdentity) {
window
.netlifyIdentity
.on("init", user => {
if (!user) {
window
.netlifyIdentity
.on("login", () => {
document.location.href = "/admin/";
});
}
});
}
</script>
</body>
</html>
</code></pre>
<p>Dumb. Pushing again and waiting for the deploy now. Okay, darn. So the config is still busted somehow. Please hold. So I left a space between sections in the config. Let’s see if it’s that. I’m guessing <code>.yml</code> files are strict about that. Deploying again with a fix.</p>
<p>Gah! Failed to load <code>config.yml </code> still. Opening up the browser’s console and it looks like it can’t find the file at all (404, duh). OKAY. So I’m being extremely dumb here, I know it. I wonder if I’m putting the <code>/admin</code> folder in the wrong directory. The docs says it needs to be adjacent to <code>_src</code>.</p>
<p>Boy the docs are a bit confusing when it comes to where you should put the admin directory. I should probably contribute to fix this confusion once I figure out what I’m doing wrong.</p>
<p>...huh. Okay, so I threw the <code>/admin</code> directory into <code>/_site</code> and that...worked. Now I can see the admin interface and login with a username and password on my local environment. But <code>_site</code> is in my gitignore because in 11ty that’s the folder that everything is compiled into. Is it because I’m ignoring <code>.yml</code> files in my <code>eleventy.js</code>? What...on earth am I doing wrong...?</p>
<p>OKAY. Let’s back up: in Eleventy there is the concept of “passing through” files. You have a bunch of files and Eleventy’s job is to convert those files into another type of file. That’s great if you have a <code>.njk</code> file and want it to be an <code>.html</code> file. But sometimes Eleventy doesn’t know what certain types of files are and/or should be. So you have to manually tell them to “pass through” Eleventy into the same directory, except now it’s copied into <code>/_site</code> which is where all your converted files live and is where your site is served from.</p>
<p>BASICALLY I wasn’t telling Eleventy to move that <code>admin/config.yml</code> file into <code>_site/admin/config.yml</code> because Eleventy didn’t know what .yml is. So in my <code>.eleventy.js</code> file I added the following:</p>
<pre><code>eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy("admin");
</code></pre>
<p>I should’ve known this I guess but I touch Eleventy so infrequently that it’s easy to forget stuff like this and I assumed I was doing something wrong with the Netlify CMS script. Plus there’s no obvious thing to say “hey, idiot. it’s this thing that’s broken.”</p>
<p>Okay so I also fixed my Git SSH whatever in iTerm because this was annoying me. Now I’m waiting for one more deploy to see if this all worked.</p>
<p>Finally I need to send myself an email from the Identity tab of Netlify, open the email and add a password and BOOM! I have logged in and I now have CMS access to my site. I’m writing this post right now in the CMS. The editor is okay but it would be so cool if the preview of the text was my actual website. Is that technically possible? I dunno. Would be neat.</p>
<p>See what I mean with all of this nonsense though? Just trying to make my site easier to work with took me a whole bunch of time and confusion just to add a CMS to a static site. Why can’t working with the Jamstack be...easier? I know Netlify is doing a bunch of wonderful work in this space but I can’t help but UGH every time I think about contributing to a site with just some dang text. Publishing in 2020 should be as easy as dragging and dropping a file but it still requires a bunch of technical know-how.</p>
<p>At least mine is 1% easier to work with now, I guess. Now let’s hit publish and see if this thing works...</p>
Notes about product design2020-05-09T12:00:31Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/notes-about-product-design/<p>This gig is about throwing all the toys on the floor and making a giant mess before slowly putting everything into labelled buckets, separating some things, subcategorizing others, binning the trash that needs to go. It’s all about inventing classifications for things — a Dewey Decimal system of desires.</p>
<hr />
<p>A lot of folks tend to think that product design means fonts and big, rounded corners, splashy gradients and animations. Conversations will focus entirely on <em>how</em> and <em>what</em> instead of <em>why</em>. That’s because the latter feels extremely scary—you have to show people how little you understand and many tend not to be capable of such vulnerability with strangers.</p>
<p>Also most people understandably hate confusing things and cannot bear to be confused themselves—we all naturally shy away from it and move towards the things we understand, things we can control. Working on fonts and rounded corners and the aesthetics of a card all feels productive, calm even. But it’s important to remember that’s because it’s the easy work.</p>
<p>The problem is that being confused just doesn’t feel productive. (I am slowly learning this).</p>
<p>Product design is about <em>mapping that confusion</em> though; it’s in the correlation between things, in the syntax and the words. Diagrams and arrows—endless files overflowing with boxes pointing to other nearby boxes. Product designers must map the thicket of confusing uncontrollable jungle-nightmare-mess in front of them and then clear a pathway straight through it. But the beginning is insurmountable. There’s too much jungle, too much baffling confusion.</p>
<p>It’s hard to accept at first but productive days in this line of work are often spent being entirely confused.</p>
<p>Giving yourself up to that confusion, basking in it even, is the first important step towards making a thing great. Next up is showing other people how confusing everything is, too.</p>
<hr />
<p>Bad product design is when folks talk more about the UI than what the UI is built on top of. I don’t care if the grid is 8px or if there is no grid at all — that’s not product design. Great product design can survive without a shiny UI but I feel like I’m in the minority when it comes to this argument.</p>
<p>A lot of people just can’t see great product design though. If things make sense then you’ll never think about how much work went into that, how it required learning about how users think and feel and interact with software.</p>
<p>There’s a lot of talk about how great design is invisible—mostly boring conversations with little substance—but! I think that’s true when it comes to product design.</p>
<hr />
<p>Good work of any kind requires two things. First, we need somewhere to be entirely alone. We need a space without distractions where we can churn on an idea, on a problem, without someone bugging us. We need extended periods of loneliness—no meetings, no catch-ups, no 1x1s. That isn’t the work. We need to pace around freely or talk out loud to ourselves, we need to type or draw (to map the jungle thicket), and we need room for bad ideas to breathe and take shape before we burn them to the ground and start all over again.</p>
<p>Simply put: we need loneliness in ample doses.</p>
<p>But there’ll be a moment when we need to show that work and argue over it. We’ll need to argue loudly (but in a healthy way) about what works and be brutally honest about what doesn’t make a lick of sense.</p>
<p>It’s unnerving whenever I meet designers who don’t like arguing—who don’t appreciate the value of being wrong. (In fact, I distinctly remember talking to an ex-manager of mine who called me out for this—“you often change your mind and I think that’s really bad” she told me. “Ah!” I replied, “but I’m often wrong and other folks have better ideas. I don’t care about who has the best idea, I just care about getting to that place—however much embarrassment it takes to make a thing truly great.” She looked back at me and didn’t get it, couldn’t understand that arguing and being wrong all the time is half the work of this job.)</p>
<p>Anyway, argue (in a healthy way) but make sure to limit the number of people arguing. Great work requires an argument of two, three, four people max. <a href="https://css-tricks.com/how-to-build-a-bad-design-system/">No more than that though.</a></p>
<hr />
<p>Bad product design is when your interface looks like your org chart.</p>
<p>So many folks will start a project and call it Project Nifty. They’ll start talking about Project Nifty throughout the company; in meetings and standups. People will familiarize themselves with Nifty to such a degree and over such long periods of time that they can no longer imagine a time before Nifty. So when it comes to naming the feature and making a menu item they’ll call it Nifty and write docs about how Nifty works and how it fits into everything else. But a product designer needs to step back and ignore the team and the project and think about it all from the outside-in; Project Nifty is useful, great even, but we shouldn’t call it that, we shouldn’t force our users to understand what Nifty is.</p>
<p>And we should never show users our org chart.</p>
<p>So to do great product design we need to <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/unlearning-the-ui">unlearn the UI</a>—which is hard enough as it is—but we also need to unlearn the org as well.</p>
Unlearning the UI2020-04-29T21:33:01Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/unlearn-the-ui/<p>With my new gig at Sentry I’ve returned to product design again as I hope to move as far away from design systems for as long as I can. Buttons and colors and fonts will catch up to me eventually, as they always do, but for the moment I need to slow down, be quiet, hands placed firmly in pockets. Because in order to do a good job I have to understand how everything click-clacks together in the way that it does.</p>
<p>So I must unlearn the UI.</p>
<p>Ignore the patterns and accessibility! Ignore the damn fonts! Eff the colors and the white-space! And the border-radius? That chap can go to hell, too! I’ve spent years now training myself to notice and sweat these details, to go rummaging about in the codebase to fix them. But I must unsee everything like this if I hope to be a great product designer. And that’s extremely tough.</p>
<p>Instead, I have to ask myself questions like “why?” and also “why???”—I have to understand every little detail that goes into it all. Why does this feature exist? What problem were they trying to solve? How is this system of verbs and nouns used? What do people mean when they say X and why do other people mean Y when they say Z?</p>
<p>No one will tell you this, but product design is the work of a detective.</p>
<p>This sort of questioning can quickly fall into useless philosophical quandaries that lead nowhere though—the sort of questions designed only to boost someone’s ego instead. I cannot count the number of meetings I’ve been in where someone will walk into the room and asks a bunch of questions, expecting you to praise them for it. These half-baked Steve Jobs impersonators believe that the questions are the work—but they’re not!</p>
<p>I’ve found that great product design requires two things. First off: no ego, no bravado, with every question leading to an answer. Secondly, great product design requires that we feel permanently, catastrophically dumb. If you ever feel smart during the design process then something has probably gone wrong and you haven’t noticed or you’re merely clueless to the fact that you have no idea what you’re doing at all.</p>
<p>Anyway, before good work can be done I must unlearn the UI and ask the same question over and over again until hurts, until everyone in the room is visibly upset.</p>
<p>And so I must return to the realm of maps and questions, nouns and verbs.</p>
Everything Is Embarrassing2020-04-16T15:16:23Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/everything-is-embarrassing/<p>Helena Fitzgerald made some lovely notes about <a href="https://getpocket.com/explore/item/everything-is-embarrassing-on-loving-the-national">her favorite band</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Most of the things we love are the things that embarrass us.</p>
<p>[...] I had never loved a band like I loved this band, and the truth is I never really have since. I acknowledge that quite a lot of music is better than the National, more accomplished, more important, more coherent, and less embarrassing. But we rarely love things for reasons that aren’t embarrassing. The things we really love say more about who we are than we’d like them to say. The National are far and away my favorite band, but if you asked me what music I like and I didn’t know you well, I wouldn’t necessarily mention them. That answer would reveal too much. Maybe I don’t want you to know me that well; maybe I don’t want to be that known.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I feel like The National is always on the outskirts for me—I mostly forget they exist and then spend weeks listening to nothing but one album of theirs on repeat. A quick search a minute ago and I didn’t even realize that they put out an album last year! I’m a dummy and so shall fix this by listening to Roman Holiday from now until the end of time.</p>
The Myth of No Effort2020-04-15T11:30:09Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-myth-of-no-effort/<p><a href="https://youtu.be/SOfOlOQIcqw">This talk</a> by John Roderick is still outstanding. Dammit, ugh! I remember sitting in the audience that year and swooning the whole way through this thing (you can actually see me in the video sat next to two people I love and at one point in the recording I swear you can hear my goofy laugh, too).</p>
<p>John talks about “the myth of no effort”; for years he believed that talent should replace any hard work, and that he wanted to loaf about on his couch making songs without having to try. That’s something that I think I believed for a long time, too. And it’s something that <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/on-writing">I still struggle with</a> from time to time.</p>
<p>Anyway, this talk is like an excellent blog post; equal parts vulnerable and funny, as if John is typing things out loud in front of a live audience.</p>
Hyperbolic Time Chamber v.32020-04-13T20:18:58Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/hyperbolic-time-chamber-v3/<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<figure class="m-wrapper--unpadded" style="margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 10px;">
<img alt="The Hyperbolic Time Chamber" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/htc.jpg" />
</figure>
</div>
<p>San Francisco is now warmer with each passing day, the winter chill almost tuned out from the evenings. It’s the sort of weather that I completely adore, the very cusp between winter and summer, and it’s the reason why I can’t imagine living anywhere else whilst I’m sat here in my kitchen with the window open listening to <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/4dBt1RkjxNFGdEVSw7UfrU?si=B7McJJT7SxSFMbqSKAFBwg">Monoliths</a>.</p>
<p>The exercise? Oh, that’s getting ever so slightly easier and I’ve started to incorporate more weight training into each day, although it is growing increasingly difficult to avoid baking endless mountains of cake and I have a packet of biscuits in my cupboard that I can hear screaming my name. But despite that, and for the first time since I started trying to fix my health, I’ve now begun to feel happy…ish.</p>
<p>There’s no progress to speak of, it’s still far too soon for that, but there’s <em>hope</em> for progress to be made. And that’s enough for me.</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<figure class="m-wrapper--unpadded">
<img alt="Workout stats for this week" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/htc-week3.png" loading="lazy" />
</figure>
</div>
<hr />
<p>This morning I went down one heck of a rabbit hole with my website. I noticed that I had a performance score of 88 when I threw my website into <a href="https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights">Pagespeed Insights</a>. It reminded me of when Dave Rupert mentioned last month about the difficulty of <a href="https://daverupert.com/2020/03/maintaining-performance/">maintaining performance</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This story is less about webfont performance and is actually framing for another point I’m trying to make. I, Dave Rupert, a person who cares about web performance, a person who reads web performance blogs, a person who spends lots of hours trying to keep up on best practices, a person who co-hosts a weekly podcast about making websites and speak with web performance professionals… somehow goofed and added 33 SECONDS to their page load.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Somehow performance of this here website slipped whilst I wasn’t paying enough attention, too. And although I’m certainly not as experienced as Dave, I do tend to rant about why making websites fast is <a href="https://css-tricks.com/accessibility-and-web-performance-are-not-features-theyre-the-baseline/">so dang important</a>.</p>
<p>So: I dug through the report and noticed a couple of things. First off, I found that I should be inlining all the styles of my site into the <code><head></code> of the document — that way I don’t need to make a round trip just to grab the styles. Also, I knew that I could replace the image for the custom cursor with a <a href="https://css-tricks.com/data-uris/">data URI</a>, so I could get rid of that server-round-trip, too.</p>
<p>With the Eleventy docs I discovered <a href="https://www.11ty.dev/docs/quicktips/inline-css/">how to inline CSS relatively easily</a>, although it required that I had to figure out a bit more about how templating languages worked. I decided to switch everything over to using Nunjucks in the process and with all that work (about 2 hours of faffing about) I bumped the score up to 96/98. All this does have me looking at my fonts and wondering if I should ditch them just to get the perfect score.</p>
<p>But no! The fonts are worth something, surely.</p>
<p>Anyway, thanks to Andy Bell’s <a href="https://hylia.website/">Hylia</a> project for giving me some great tips on how to improve things. On that note, I’m really looking forward to <a href="https://piccalil.li/course/learn-eleventy-from-scratch/">Andy’s course all about Eleventy</a>.</p>
<hr />
<p>I chatted with my pal <a href="https://www.patreon.com/LucyBellwood">Lucy Bellwood</a> earlier today. Her work and feedback and thoughts about publishing are always stupidly inspiring and her Patreon (which yes I will link to <a href="https://www.patreon.com/LucyBellwood">again</a> and <a href="https://www.patreon.com/LucyBellwood">again</a>) is the perfect example of working in public, and just the sort of thing that I aspire to.</p>
<p>Whenever we talk my phone tends to fill up with notes for books to read and websites to surf. In fact, I can always tell how much I completely adore someone, and it’s this: whenever I walk away and I’m genuinely excited for all the homework.</p>
<hr />
<p>I’ve been playing Final Fantasy 7 for the past couple of days and dear lord I couldn’t love it more if I tried. The original game was such an important part of my childhood and I swear that it’s what made me want to become a writer. Sure, the game involves a yellow haired boy and his giant sword but the bulk of the game is made up of thousands upon thousands of lines of text. The art is special, but it’s the story that won me over.</p>
<p>Also, there’s a brief moment early on when the Aerith theme tune kicks in and I was dragged back to the summer of ‘99—I’m shirtless, sitting on the bunk-bed, refusing to give the controller to my brother, praying for the sun to go down so that I can see the tiny television screen more clearly. And yes those are tears in my eyes, I fear nothing!</p>
<hr />
<p>Speaking of which, Paddington and Paddington 2 thoroughly wrecked me this week. The second film is a damn masterpiece and Hugh Grant should’ve won every Oscar for every category of 2017. Woof.</p>
Seraph2020-04-11T09:10:38Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/seraph/<p><a href="https://www.seraphs.varfont.com/">Seraph</a> is equal parts stately and weird—it’s a new type family from <a href="https://www.berndvolmer.com/">Bernd Volmer</a> and the specimen site happens to be simply outstanding. This is mostly thanks to the wide range of styles available; from slab, sans, wedge, tuskan, and calligraphic. But Seraph also happens to be a great showcase for what’s possible with <a href="https://css-tricks.com/a-new-responsive-font-format-for-the-web/">variable fonts</a>, too. The website shows that you can have an almost-slab-tuskan-sans or an extremely-wedge-calligraphic-tuskan.</p>
<p>Welcome to 2020, the year of weird web type!</p>
<p>Volmer designed the website as well as the font family itself, and this rather joyous thing shows off just a little of what’s possible by animating between all the variations of the family. And for some reason this all makes me want to flee to a cabin in the woods and write a horror novel: these big twisted variations could be used to make a monster of a webpage.</p>
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<p>See what I mean? Animating letters like this on the web was possible before variable fonts but it was sort of a nightmare and required a ton of work.</p>
<p>Also, I wonder if variable fonts will start to become so popular that they change the way we see digital fonts and the act of typography itself. I can imagine the difference between bold and italic, regular and condensed—but that’s because I was brought up buying specific font files for those variants. Now that we have variable fonts, we’re starting to smudge the lines between these categories and I wonder what effect that will have on how we all think about typesetting.</p>
<p>Does that make sense? I’m not so sure I’ve had enough coffee to be blogging about fonts just yet.</p>
Hyperbolic Time Chamber v.22020-04-06T14:32:24Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/hyperbolic-time-chamer-v2/<div class="m-wrapper--full">
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<img alt="The Hyperbolic Time Chamber" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/htc.jpg" />
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<p>This week was mostly good. It’s hard to say that during the pandemic (to care about your own well-being seems so very selfish). But the daily exercise is helping me concentrate and be a bit more upbeat. Although...the weigh in was certainly disappointing. I know I shouldn’t expect too much in the first week but I’ve been absurdly strict with diet and exercise; I’ve been throwing all my frustration into back-breaking 90 minute workouts everyday and eating nothing but eggs and chicken with rice. I wonder if I’m heavier because I’m gaining a bunch of pure, raw, unstoppable muscle? Yeah, it’s probably that.</p>
<p>Perhaps weighing myself weekly is a bad idea for morale though.</p>
<p>My body hasn’t visibly changed much yet but my legs are completely wild. “<em>Muscles are supposed to be here!?</em>” I said out loud the other day to myself in my entirely empty apartment like a very normal person. Regardless, as slow as progress is, it’s good training for my patience and discipline. To work on a really long project for months and months whilst cooped up here, I mean.</p>
<p>1% better everyday, etc.</p>
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<img alt="Workout stats for this week" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/april-6.jpg" loading="lazy" />
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<p>I’m watching people workout on TikTok and it helps seeing so many people fight against this thing in their own way. My favorite part of going to the gym was watching folks push themselves to the very brink of what they’re capable of. And then coming back the next day to do it again. And again. Relentlessly. And so watching TikTok workouts feel like that.</p>
<p>Still, I always prefer the videos (TikToks? Toks? Tikkies?) that are like “this is what I’m doing” instead of “here’s how to do XYZ” And I think it’s because 1. Everyone wants to be an expert which is really annoying and 2. Fucking up and experimenting in public makes us all so vulnerable.</p>
<p>And there’s a form of kindness in being vulnerable, I guess.</p>
<hr />
<p>I could watch <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeEDO68FEJM">Chris tinker around</a> and build stuff all day long. I always admire the way that he confronts a roadblock — a thingy not working, a doodad failing for reasons — he just plows straight through it until whatever it is ends up working again. I love that so very much.</p>
<p>Also, in that video Chris uses <a href="https://getkap.co/">Kap</a> which records your screen and lets you export that video as a gif. I’ve been using <a href="https://giphy.com/apps/giphycapture">GIPHY capture</a> for a while but this looks so much better.</p>
<hr />
<p>To make the Hyperbolic Time Chamber image above I used a service that removes the background of an image called <a href="https://www.remove.bg/">remove.bg</a>. It’s really impressive, although I do wish that it was built right into <a href="https://figma.com/">Figma</a>. There is <a href="https://github.com/aaroniker/figma-remove-bg">a Figma plugin</a> that lets you hit the <a href="http://remove.bg/">remove.bg</a> API but after faffing about with it for a little while I couldn’t seem to get it all working. Not sure what I’m doing wrong here. Hmmmm.</p>
<p>They do have <a href="https://www.remove.bg/windows-mac-linux">a desktop app</a> though, which is great.</p>
<hr />
<p>I’m sat in my kitchen with Ali right now. It’s raining outside and I’m listening to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXQi77eOdEY">this stream of Four Tet</a>. It’s also very good.</p>
<hr />
<p>I’m not a fan of war films for the most part but the other night I watched <a href="https://letterboxd.com/film/1917/">1917</a> for the first time and <em>damn</em> I loved every second of it. There’s a certain distance the film takes away from the conflict, as if you’re a tourist walking through the battlefield and only seeing the aftermath, and that somehow makes everything so much more horrifying.</p>
<p>Tonight we’re watching Paddington.</p>
<hr />
<p>For reasons beyond my understanding I bought the remastered versions of Modern Warfare 1 + 2 this weekend and played straight through both of them. They’re dumb, but impressively so. Like a Fast and the Furious movie where so much time has been spent making the dumbest and sometimes most joyous and un-self-conscious thing imaginable.</p>
<p>Everyone sees MW1/2 and thinks that they’re just first person shooters though. But that’s dead wrong! The whole time I played them this weekend and I was like...aahhhh...yes...these are horror games! They have all the pacing of an old horror film; slow, creeping steps through a house with night vision goggles, a paranoid walk across icy forests — and then, blammo! Big dumb action stuff breaks all the tension. Sometimes exquisitely so.</p>
<p>Anyway, I think the reason why the campaign of the most recent one is so disappointing is because they misunderstood this bit; the fact that it’s a horror series, and not just a shooter.</p>
<hr />
<p>I didn’t even know who Neil Gaiman was until about a week ago when I began his <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/norse-mythology">Norse Mythology</a> collection (which I’d recommend in an instant). And I know this is probably like talking about <em>The Wire</em> or something considering how popular he is, but this week I started reading <em>Neverwhere</em> and I already adore it. It also begins with one of my favorite opening sentences of any book:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The night before he went to London, Richard Mayhew was not enjoying himself.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There’s something so very <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._G._Wodehouse">P.G. Wodehouse</a> about it; the fumbling bumbling charm to it is present here already. I know where it’s going, I get a good sense of the tone of this thing, and I know there’s going to be a lovable goofball somewhere in this novel. All I have to do is find them.</p>
Let’s all wear a mask2020-04-05T13:03:49Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/let%E2%80%99s-all-wear-a-mask/<p>Here’s Maciej Cegłowski on <a href="https://idlewords.com/2020/04/let_s_all_wear_a_mask.htm">why we should wear a mask</a> when walking around in public:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In countries like Taiwan and Japan, even before this pandemic started, it was common for people to put on a mask on at the first sign of a cold, or to wear one at all times in the winter months, particularly on public transportation. It was a small courtesy to fellow passengers.</p>
<p>If you’ve never seen it before, a subway car full of people wearing surgical masks can be an arresting sight. In America, we still tend to associate face masks with hospitals and illness. But it only takes a short time for the practice to start feeling normal, and that’s where we want to get to in the next couple of weeks across America and Europe.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Here in the states, the <abbr title="Center for Disease Control and Prevention">CDC</abbr> is now recommending <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/diy-cloth-face-coverings.html">wearing a mask</a>, weeks into the pandemic. This is the result of middle-management and incompetence at such an unimaginable scale.</p>
Planet Hearth2020-04-04T13:03:03Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/planet-hearth/<p>I’ve been listening to <a href="https://calibre.bandcamp.com/album/planet-hearth">Planet Hearth</a> by Calibre relentlessly over the past couple of days and I’ve found it to be excellent web-surfing and work music. It’s more gentle than Calibre’s previous stuff.</p>
<p>Last night I was listening to it whilst making this <a href="https://codepen.io/robinrendle/live/29a65bcfa42b3e86641f1af9541ccfa0">CSS carousel</a> below—I quickly fell into a little trance, click-clacking bits of new-ish CSS together. Although it doesn’t look like much, this bad boy uses zero JavaScript and, with the help of CSS Grid, it would take maybe four lines of CSS to make it responsive, too.</p>
<p>It feels very <em>webbish</em> to me. Like the way it hijacks your scroll isn’t offensive and although carousels are rightfully despised by web designers, I do think they have a use. I can imagine this thing being perfect for a fashion site. Or it could be used to hop to bits of text in some documentation. Or maybe a graphic design portfolio. Or something something books.</p>
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<p>Last night was one of those moments where I realized just how far CSS has come. It’s no longer this thing you can shrug off, or sit back and laugh about its flaws. Centering things in CSS is just <a href="https://twitter.com/bdc/status/1245399999300558853">two lines of code</a> now. Yikes.</p>
<p>So much time and energy has been spent improving things by browser manufacturers, engineers, designers, and advocates. Things on the web don’t just improve all by themselves—they require countless hours of arguing, and prototyping, building, and then educating. But all these little features build on top of one another to make something incredibly beautiful. So much so, than when I started my career in web design, making something like the above would be a giant pain but now it takes about 20 minutes to make something almost production ready.</p>
<p>Anyway, I’ll be sure to write about how I made it for the <a href="https://css-tricks.com/newsletters/">CSS-Tricks newsletter</a> this weekend, probably whilst bopping along to Planet Hearth again.</p>
An interview with Ted Chiang2020-04-02T19:50:44Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/an-interview-with-ted-chiang/<p>I like this bit from <a href="https://electricliterature.com/ted-chiang-explains-the-disaster-novel-we-all-suddenly-live-in/">an interview</a> with Ted Chiang:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...traditional “good vs. evil” stories follow a certain pattern: the world starts out as a good place, evil intrudes, good defeats evil, and the world goes back to being a good place. These stories are all about restoring the status quo, so they are implicitly conservative. Real science fiction stories follow a different pattern: the world starts out as a familiar place, a new discovery or invention disrupts everything, and the world is forever changed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I really enjoyed Ted’s collection of short sci-fi stories, <em><a href="https://bookshop.org/a/269/9781101947883">Exhalation</a></em>, too.</p>
Visa acquired!2020-04-02T19:21:23Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/visa-acquired/<p>I have news! This week I found out that my visa has been approved and so now I’m ready to start work at the ever-so-excellent <a href="https://sentry.io/welcome/">Sentry</a>. My first day will be at the end of the month and I couldn’t be more excited; the team is fabulous, the product is useful, and the business model is sound. Not only that, but everyone appears to be funny, too (although I sort of take offense to this because, by law, I should be the only one making jokes).</p>
<p>Joining Sentry ties into my obsession for the past four years; learning how to make great software and being able to see all the problems within a codebase—Sentry helps folks debug issues with their code and suggests ways to fix them. It’s real neat.</p>
<p>Anyway, it took 127 days for the visa to go through and the whole time I’ve been a complete nervous wreck. I’ve likely done a poor job pretending to be cool with it all. So if you’ve seen me since last November then please bear that in mind. I’m sorry.</p>
<p>This week I’ll be sat on my porch trying to unwind the psychic damage of all that sleepless waiting, and waiting, and waiting. Phew.</p>
I need a hobby, do not read this one2020-04-01T12:23:09Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/design-brainstorms-are-a-waste-of-time/<p>It begins with sticky notes: everyone in the room has been given five minutes, maybe ten, to scribble their ideas down, a few minutes more tacking them up on the wall, and then talking through each one—an example might be a suggestion for a new feature or a product. Another ten minutes is then spent grouping all these stickies into categories (for reasons beyond my comprehension). And most of the time there’s ten or more people in that room, which is <a href="https://css-tricks.com/how-to-build-a-bad-design-system/">always a very bad idea</a>.</p>
<p>But here’s the thing: nothing good has ever come out of a design brainstorm. If they work for you, that’s neat—please tell me how to make them better. But before you do, think for a little bit about what shipped because of all those brainstorms.</p>
<p>I’ll bet not a single damn thing.</p>
<p>From my experience the best work has always come out of incredibly small teams; one, two, or three people working intensely close together. That’s when the best work takes place—in all that friction between small batches of <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/partners-in-crime">friendly antagonists</a>—not this “design thinking” nonsense that is a practice rife throughout Silicon Valley.</p>
<p>There are infinite books, blog posts, podcasts, and TED talks—each ranting about how vital these sticky notes are to the survival of our species. But these meetings are not much more than ego-propellent; designed for managers to feel as if they’re contributing to something useful, and for ex-designers to sell a bunch of joyless books.</p>
<p>How do you fix design brainstorms? Break them! Cancel the dang meeting, kick a bunch of people out of the room, and then give your team the autonomy to do the right thing. Ignore the growing industry of con artists and snake-oil salesmen. And don’t invite the Big and Important Design Person who has an embarrassing Twitter bio to speak (<em>I’m a recovering digital nomad. Previously: Design Architect at Twitter, Chief Design Wizard at Square, Genius Inventor of the Hashtag</em>). Ignore everyone that is trying to sell you the latest trend of putting sticky notes on a wall and calling it Extreme Design Thinking™. It doesn’t work.</p>
<p>What works is caring intensely for small teams instead.</p>
<p>(Wow, I really need to go for a walk huh.)</p>
Hyperbolic Time Chamber v.12020-03-31T09:44:42Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/hyperbolic-time-chamber-week-1/<p>To spread out the anxiety a bit during the Quarantimes, I’ve transformed my apartment into the <a href="https://dragonball.fandom.com/wiki/Hyperbolic_Time_Chamber">Hyperbolic Time Chamber</a>; I picked up an exercise bike and I’ve started to treat my health more seriously. I also noticed that throwing all this excess attention into one thing is incredibly calming, alongside it being good for my health. With each day my goals are simple: eat well, wake up early, and push myself on the bicycle.</p>
<p>It’s sort of dumb, but it helps.</p>
<p>Anyway, progress is slow—I’ve only started measuring things recently—but I can already see a difference. My attention and focus is returning to normal. I feel like I’m taking things less seriously. I’m hopeful about things again.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/htc-week1.jpeg" alt="" /></p>
<p>I’ve been working out for about six months now but I’m cranking up the heat considerably. Eating well is always the hardest part about this. And I guess I have a long way to go until I’m happy about things, but perhaps recording progress here will make myself a bit more accountable.</p>
<p>Yay for blogging about embarrassing things! I am growing and learning!</p>
Ghosts V–VI2020-03-28T12:17:38Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/ghosts-v-vi/<p>Not much to report today: San Francisco is intermittently speckled with rain and the tree outside my bedroom window sways from side to side whilst I pretend to do useful things with my keyboard. All is quiet here in the quarantine. But wait! Where on earth are my manners…I do have something to report: a compliment, a recommendation, an old love!</p>
<p>I’m rambling of course about Nine Inch Nails and the newly released <a href="https://store.nin.com/products/ghosts-digital-download">Ghosts V–VI</a>. I’ve been listening to it all endlessly on repeat and it’s a joyous thing; in equal measure dark and crooked, whilst gentle. Hopeful, even. But also the opposite of that—dark flashes of hatred are present, too.</p>
<p>(Writing about music is difficult, but reading about music is impossible, so I humbly apologize.)</p>
<p>When <abbr title="Nine Inch Nails">NiN</abbr> published <em>Ghosts I-IV</em> for free in 2008, I found it to be the only music I could listen to whilst working and, after many nights listening to it exclusively, I suddenly worried that it would then be the only instrumental album they would ever make. But together, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross started work on film soundtracks at a rapid pace; <em>The Social Network</em>, <em>The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</em>, <em>Gone Girl</em>. Each of these movies were exponentially improved by their score and made each one captivating, thrilling, and haunting, too.</p>
<p>(I think my favorite movie-going experience of all time is <em>The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo</em>, when I walked through the rain and the blistering cold of Reading in the <abbr title="United Kingdom">UK</abbr>. It was midnight, and it was a long hike alone from my dorm to the theatre. After the film, I walked back through the city in the dark and took an even longer way home with the soundtrack blaring in my headphones. Ahead of me, in the orange-glow of ambient streetlight, I remember two deaf women holding hands and skipping back to campus along cobbled streets; they were signing to each other all the way and their laughter was exponential and explosive. It was beautiful.)</p>
<p>Since then, Trent and Atticus scored <em>Before the Flood</em> (perfection), <em>Patriots Day</em> (very good), <em>Bird Box</em> (also very good), and three volumes of music for the <em>Watchmen</em> television show (dear lord it is wondrous). But it was their score for <em>The Vietnam War</em> (~yikes~) that broke me in half and made me cry along to every single dang episode.</p>
<p>Besides the music itself, the thing I love about Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (gosh, I’m still typing huh) is that they appear to treat music as work—they crank out score after score at such a blistering pace that it’s bewildering. And this is why I’m obsessed with <abbr title="Nine Inch Nails">NiN</abbr> beyond measure I think; it’s their work ethic. They treat music as a gig, not as art.</p>
<p>And all this reminds me of this old post I wrote ages ago when I tried to remind myself that I shouldn’t treat <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/books-as-work">books as art, but as work instead</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There’s this troubling belief when just starting out as a writer that your favorite texts aren’t just bits of paper strung together but are instead works of art; ethereal and everlasting. This is constantly reinforced in popular culture, at university and even by many of the authors themselves. There are Fine Ages of Literature. There are the Classics. There is the English Canon. There is the Great American Novel. There are times and places that are more important than other times and places.</p>
<p>But the more I learn about writing, both from friends that have published books and from distant yet-to-be colleagues in the writing game, is that it simply isn’t healthy to see books as works of art — made by a single artistic genius in complete isolation. This is because elevating them to the status of mythos makes the work of book writing even harder than it really is. It makes us less capable of picking up a pen, of making notes, of having the patience and confidence to start typing, clicking, designing and building our own books.</p>
<p>We can’t afford to see books as art if we want to make a contribution, whatever size that might be, to the world of bookmaking. Rather, we must see books as work instead.</p>
</blockquote>
GT Type catalogue2020-03-27T15:27:07Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/gt-type/<p>For some reason today I find myself scouring through the archives of <a href="https://www.grillitype.com/">Grilli Type</a> and I particularly love the catalogue page where they show a list of every family available:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/grilli-type.png" alt="A screenshot of the Grilli Type website" /></p>
<p>It’s a simple layout without any flair, but dang I just want to buy every single typeface here. Like the ever-so-weird <a href="https://www.grillitype.com/typeface/gt-alpina">GT Alipna Condensed Bold</a>! Or <a href="https://www.grillitype.com/typeface/gt-alpina">GT Walsheim Condensed</a>, a geometric-inspired sans that I just can’t stop staring at:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/gt-walsheim.png" alt="A picture of the GT Walsheim typeface" /></p>
Norse Mythology2020-03-26T10:28:57Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/norse-mythology/<p>I ravaged this collection of short stories by Neil Gaiman called <em>Norse Mythology</em>; it reminds me of Karin Tidbeck’s <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/jagannath">Jagannath</a> and brought me back to replaying the latest installment in the God of War series. Gaiman collects some of the most interesting stories of the Norse gods—Thor, Odin, Loki—and I just couldn’t put the book down, devouring the whole thing in just two sittings.</p>
<p>Why though? What is it about these stories that I find so entrancing? Well, I think it has something to do with perspective. In one story about the death of the god Baldur, Hermod travels to the underworld to bring him back:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“All things mourn him. His death unites us all in misery, god and frost giant, dwarf and elf. The animals mourn him, and the trees. Even the metals weep. The stones dream that brave Balder will return to the lands that know the sun. Let him go.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>Even the metals weep.</em> Whoa. Also, in the scene just before this, Frigg ventures out into the world so that she can ask all things to keep Balder safe from harm:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>She walked the earth and exacted an oath from each thing that she encountered never to harm Balder the beautiful. She spoke to fire, and it promised it would not burn him; water gave its oath never to drown him; iron would not cut him, nor would any of the other metals. Stones promised never to bruise his skin. Frigg spoke to trees, to beasts, and to birds and to all things that creep and fly and crawl, and each creature promised that its kind would never hurt Balder. The trees agreed, each after its kind, oak and ash, pine and beech, birch and fir, that their wood could never be used to hurt Balder.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is something that an English writer would probably not write naturally, as we would almost never personify the earth or the trees or the metals. But every dang sword and weapon, shoe and necklace in Norse mythology appears to have a name, too. There is Mjollnir, Yggdrasil, the Gjallerhorn and the Fimbulwinter. Odin’s ring is called Draupnir, and Sleipnir is the eight-legged stallion he rides. The Midgard serpent is called Jormungundr, whilst Naglfar and Skidbladnir are great ships.</p>
<p>Everything in these tales has a name, and everything has an arc.</p>
The world’s copyright system is broken2020-03-24T13:57:13Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/broken-copyright/<p>I adore this video all about the past, present, and future of copyright by Tom Scott. He looks at how our legal system no longer makes any sense, as today we don’t need a big publishing company to distribute our work to millions of people; our existing laws were built for giant companies and lawyers instead.</p>
<p>My favorite bit is towards the end when Tom argues that copyright should last no longer than fifty years (which I think is pretty dang reasonable to be honest):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If you invent something that literally changes the world then great, you get 20 years to make all the money you can. And after that you will be out-competed by people who can do it better and cheaper. But write a song and you get until you’re dead, and your descendants get another 70 years—and that is ridiculous.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, all the orphaned works, the obscure things where no-one can track down the copyright holder any more to ask for a license...well, they can’t be archived. They can’t be copied. They often can’t be preserved at all.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Also? Damn I love the way that Tom narrates his story and makes his arguments. His long rambling walks across London are ~extremely~ good.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1Jwo5qc78QU" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
Further than we’ve ever walked2020-03-21T11:57:13Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/further-than-we%E2%80%99ve-ever-walked/<p>From Alice Bartlett’s blog, <a href="https://alicebartlett.co.uk/blog/weaknotes-810">weak notes</a>, where she quotes from an entry of <a href="https://tinyletter.com/feministfriday/letters/feministfriday-episode-288-food-and-fun">Feminist Friday</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This week my thoughts have particularly turned to parents, and to parents who are working from home while their kids are under their feet and bored. I am sorry if this is you and good luck with it all. It reminds me though of a time that I very vaguely remember – I must have been three or thereabouts. There was a time when, for no clear reason that I could see, my dad was in the house way more than usual. He’d take me for a walk every day, along the little river at the back of the estate we lived on. One day we collected watercress and took it home, and my mum made soup with it. On another day, we walked through a gate that we’d not been through before, and I said “is this further than we’ve ever walked”, and my dad looked at me and smiled and said “yes darling, this is further than we’ve ever walked.”</p>
<p>Absolutely halcyon days. Perfect.</p>
<p>Anyway, recently – maybe 18 months ago – my dad said to me, “you were very young, but do you remember when [employer] was making everyone take unpaid leave for two weeks at a time and me and you went on those walks along the burn?”. It made me realise that these times of, for me, absolute magic, must have for him been conducted at an incredible pitch of stress; one small child, another on the way, a mortgage, suddenly half the salary you were expecting for a month.</p>
<p>Where I’m going with this, I guess, is that when you talk to your kids about this in the future you might say “do you remember that time of plague, when everything was awful and so stressful” and they will say “you mean those amazing times of unfettered ipad access and you were always there bringing the funtimes, they were beautiful, it could have lasted forever.”</p>
</blockquote>
Dept. of Enthusiasm2020-03-21T10:45:11Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/department-of-enthusiasm/<p>My pal Jez Burrows has started a newsletter called <a href="https://jezburrows.com/enthusiasm/">Dept. of Enthusiasm</a> and I think everyone should sign up. Why? Well, first off—rude. Second, JB is one of my favorite people in the world but he also happens to be one of my favorite writers (don’t tell him I said any of this please). He’s funny and quick-witted, careful and kind.</p>
<p>With each edition of his newsletter, Jez is going to share something that he’s fallen in love with lately. It could be a book, or a film, or anything really. And as soon as he told me about it I gasped—YES!—gimme.</p>
<p>For this tiny website I helped out to make the letters in the word “enthusiasm” hop up and down, using the finest <a href="https://robinrendle.com/adventures/videogames-and-wiggletechtm%EF%B8%8F.html">WiggleTech</a>™ technology. I’ll be sure to write about how we did that for CSS-Tricks, but in the mean time you can see the final thing here:</p>
<figure class="m-wrapper--full">
<p class="codepen" data-height="600" data-theme-id="20935" data-default-tab="result" data-user="robinrendle" data-slug-hash="wvaxEMz" style="height: 300px; box-sizing: border-box; display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; border: 2px solid; margin: 1em 0; padding: 1em;" data-pen-title="Enthusiasm">
<span>See the Pen <a href="https://codepen.io/robinrendle/pen/wvaxEMz">
Enthusiasm</a> by Robin Rendle (<a href="https://codepen.io/robinrendle">@robinrendle</a>)
on <a href="https://codepen.io/">CodePen</a>.</span>
</p>
</figure>
<script async="" src="https://static.codepen.io/assets/embed/ei.js"></script>
The one about the thing2020-03-20T23:32:51Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-one-about-the-thing/<p>I tried to avoid writing about it. To write <em>over</em> it, even; to skip, hop, and dance around the topic so that I can focus on sharing lovely things. Everything useful and everything awful has already been said about the event.</p>
<p>But dammit, I can’t focus.</p>
<hr />
<p>Paragraphs are hard for me now, and I have three books on the go, but the Internet is noticeably kinder somehow. There’s more blogging and what seems like a more distributed sort of kindness in and amongst the drama. In the afternoon, I watch Demi Adejuyigbe paint with Elmo and the world starts to make sense again.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/elmo.jpg" alt="Demi Adejuyigbe and Elmo" /></p>
<hr />
<p>On my walks around the neighborhood there are too many people outside but also too few. And the weather is beautiful; flowers have perked up, the clouds run off. I watch a couple and they cross the street to avoid a child on a bicycle.</p>
<hr />
<p>Did I mention I’m finding it hard to focus?</p>
<p>Where was I?</p>
<p>What was I just doing?</p>
<hr />
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/flowers.jpg" alt="Flowers" /></p>
<hr />
<p>I’m waiting for my visa to be processed but the government department that deals with that stuff closed today and so I likely won’t be able to start my new gig for a few more weeks, if not months. This epidemic is ruining lives, splitting families apart, but it’s the instability of the small things that appears most shocking to everyone; the disruption of our bureaucracy.</p>
<hr />
<p>Somehow this instability is bringing me closer to my family. I call my dad and shout at him for a bit and he agrees to shut his office in the UK. My brother agrees to work from home, too.</p>
<p>He texts back at 2am: “thanks for shouting at me.”</p>
<hr />
<p>I’ve been thinking about this piece by <a href="https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/notes-from-a-week/">Robin Sloan</a>, and this part caught my eye: “I never imagined a world without cafés. How can you have a world without cafés?”</p>
<hr />
<p>I’m watching Deep Space 9. I’ve never seen a Star Trek series before but damn if this show isn’t just the warmest blanket.</p>
<p>Many months ago I heard a story about the original series, an episode where the crew meets Space Lincoln (I haven’t seen it). But somehow (don’t tell me how, I love the mystery) the president climbs aboard the USS Enterprise and when he talks to Uhura he uses a racist slur. Lincoln realizes his mistake and apologizes but Uhura doesn’t understand the apology. It just doesn’t make sense to her; humanity has moved so far beyond racism that no-one on deck could comprehend the intent, let alone the language of racism.</p>
<p>I want my visions of the future like this: hopeful, a future we can be proud of. One that we can all help build.</p>
<hr />
<p>The panic is more frightening than the pandemic. And, no matter how many video games I play or how many books I read I can’t shake off the restlessness I feel. So much has happened and in such a short period of time that not even the combined power of <em>DOOM Eternal</em>, <em>Animal Crossing</em>, and <em>Wilmot’s Warehouse</em> is enough to make me happy.</p>
<p>But it’s not just the pandemic, it’s me. There have been heartbreaks of the sort I can’t mention here—my legs are jumping up and down underneath my desk whilst I type, my heart is beating faster than usual.</p>
<hr />
<p>Who came up with this blog format? The one punctuated by <code><hr></code>s and where each section is a tangent, with perhaps no connection whatsoever to the previous section? It’s a twitter-thread-in-blog media format and I like it because for now it’s the only style I can think in.</p>
<p>Longform-anything right now is impossible; I feel like I can only cope with short bursts of attention. Like yesterday, when I tried reading <em>The Water Dancer</em> by Ta-Nehisi Coates in the bath and instead I spent twenty minutes crying for no real good reason at all.</p>
<hr />
<p>I’m FaceTiming friends every day and I’m learning who the good ones are; the closest people to me, the ones I love beyond words.</p>
<hr />
<p>Two nights ago I’m stood at the bottom of the stairs leading up to her apartment, and as she opens the door, I say: “It’s so nice to see you at the end of the world.” The charm is turned up to 11.</p>
<p>(We keep 6ft distance at all times and it kills me. I notice every single damn thing I miss about her immediately.)</p>
<p>I took this walk with <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/a-thousand-ships">O</a> through the Mission in the dark; it was eerie, horrible, and romantic. But most of all it was so very quiet, as if the Mission was a stage carved out just for us and our melodrama to be acted out; we screamed at each other (about the last time I saw her, about who was right, about who was the one fucking it all up, about how frightened we were, about how much we love each other, about the past six months, about how it all felt so very wrong).</p>
<p>It’s probably the last time I’ll ever see her again, and that I cannot bear.</p>
Anxious punk rock web design2020-03-16T20:12:30Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/anxious-punk-rock-web-design/<p>Whenever I’m nervous or upset I tend to pull up my sleeves and throw myself at the ol’ website. Out of pure anxiety I’ll change the fonts over an evening of frantic typing, or I’ll bump up the font size with a glass of wine. Over a weekend I’ll get frustrated and take out all my anger on the poor navigation, or I’ll tackle responsive bugs and finally confront my one true nemesis: my homepage (that dang page will forever be undergoing a redesign because I’ll never figure out how to say hello properly).</p>
<p>This week I made some of the biggest changes in years though; I’m using a lot of weird new type choices now—using <a href="https://commercialtype.com/catalog/ayer">Ayer</a>, for starters. I updated the navigation, removed my projects, fixed all the tags on every post (which I’m still deeply <em>hmmm</em>-ing about) and I made a splashier redesign of <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/adventures/">the newsletter</a>.</p>
<p>My goal with this shake-up was to try and make the design of it all feel and sound more like, well, <em>me</em>. The visuals had to mimic the voice and tone of this bumbling, curious, and open-eyed writer that I sometimes find in myself. And I wanted it all to be fun! On desktop, the cursor is now a copy of the Final Fantasy 7 clicker, and the background on larger displays copies that same gradient that stretches across the screen.</p>
<p>The most punk rock thing about this design though? I removed the footer.</p>
<p>A lot of patterns we see on the web go unquestioned. If people want to go and find more writing of mine at the end of a post then they can go ahead and do that themselves—they don't need a giant list of entries begging with them, pleading for them to continue clicking at the end of a piece. I don’t need social links everywhere so that people will share things, if a thing is good enough then people will want their friends to read it.</p>
<p>And the same goes for the footer. I think folks will scroll back up to the navigation or swipe back to read more from the archives if they’re so inclined. But will I keep desperately nudging them to do so? Nope! I trust the reader to find their own way around without me constantly hawking for them to click things.</p>
<p>In fact, this website is not optimized for clicking at all. And that’s okay.</p>
Why is CSS frustrating?2020-03-10T12:36:29Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/why-is-css-frustrating/<p>I wrote a piece for CSS Tricks the other day about <a href="https://css-tricks.com/why-is-css-frustrating/">why the CSS language is frustrating</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I reckon the biggest issue that engineers face — and the reason why they find it all so dang frustrating — is that CSS forces you to face the webishness of the web. Things require fallbacks. You need to take different devices into consideration, and all the different ways of seeing a website: mobile, desktop, no mouse, no keyboard, etc. Sure, you have to deal with that when writing JavaScript, too, but it’s easier to ignore. You can’t ignore the layout of your site being completely broken on a phone.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I have more random thoughts about this, so please bear with me.</p>
<p>First up, the difficulty of CSS reminds me of the difficulty of book design because we’re always at arm’s length from the object we’re making. When designing a book we have to treat the InDesign file as a sort of best guess, it’s not until we print the dang thing that we begin to see all the problems. The type is too big! The colors are too dark! Ugh!</p>
<p>So the best thing to remember when designing a book is the same as when designing a website: the screen is a lie.</p>
<p>What we’re seeing on screen and what the final product will become are two very different things. We need to constantly remind ourselves that there are invisible edge cases, problems that in this context, on this screen, are made utterly invisible to us. And the only way to combat that is to change the context; to always be looking at our websites from multiple angles, moving them about, shaking them up. Whether that happens to be a bad connection, a phone, a screen reader, or a lo-res screen.</p>
<p>In other words, good web design requires empathy. And I get it, that sucks. I’m sorry. (I remember talking to a senior engineer about why accessibility is worthy of our time and attention and this conversation still bums me out to this day. Some things you should do out of kindness, simply because it’s right, and not because it affects the bottom line. Ugh.)</p>
<p>Secondly, CSS is frustrating because you have to actually think of a website like a website and not an app. That mental model is what everyone finds so viscerally upsetting. And so engineers do what feels best to them; they try to make websites work like apps, like desktop software designed in the early naughts. Something that can be controlled. Something where the JavaScript works more like Python or C++. Something where the CSS begins to look like a tightly wound clock with intricate parts controlled by lasers and the buzzing of diamond quartz.</p>
<p>So I think everyone hates CSS for forcing them to be empathetic but also because the web is so messy—despite that being the single best thing about it.</p>
<p>(This also reminds me of something that Paul Ford said many moons ago, that if a company asks for a magazine design or a giant billboard poster then that’s relatively easy. You do the design and it doesn’t necessarily change the organization at all. But if they ask for a website then suddenly this bleeds into all other parts of their organization. The website will ask questions of them that require a fundamental change in how they work, how they think about their business.)</p>
<p>(Our proximity to the web changes us.)</p>
<p>Anyway, CSS has had it rough for a long time because it’s seen as an easy language, as a dumb language, as a broken system with poor browser support. But I think it’s important to note that it’s not just a technology problem though! Engineers are tasked with <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/i-dont-believe-in-full-stack-engineering">more work than they should be</a>, the field of web design is seen as embarrassing (“I’m not a web designer, I’m a ~product~ designer”), everyone says <a href="https://css-tricks.com/no-absolutely-not/">yes to everything</a>, folks don’t see <a href="https://adactio.com/journal/13229">the difference between software and websites</a>, designers are not taught <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/the-smallest-difference">the basics of typesetting</a> or designing for <a href="https://robinrendle.com/essays/systems-mistakes-and-the-sea">complex systems</a>, and <a href="https://css-tricks.com/design-systems-and-portfolios/">the hard work often isn’t visible</a>.</p>
<p>Also also? CSS is frustrating because we treat it like something it just isn’t.</p>
Things we left in the old web2020-03-08T10:44:58Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/things-we-left-in-the-old-web/<p><a href="https://www.kickscondor.com/things-we-left-in-the-old-web/">Kicks Condor</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It seems that everything is white and blue in the present day. We’ve settled on these neutral colors, in case we need to sell it all. The old garish animated construction cones and embedded MIDI files are relegated to Neocities now—and who even cares what that is?</p>
<p>When we post, we post a few words. A picture and a few words. Some gray words on white. With a little blue.</p>
<p>This is one reason I was happy to see RSS fall out of favor. I don’t really want to read everything in Arial, gray on white with a little blue. Blog posts that were beautifully arranged in their homes, now stuffed together into a makeshift public shelter of dreary gray and white and chalked around with a little line of blue.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I disagree with a bunch of things in this post (I still believe that RSS is the web at its finest) but I enjoy the way that Kicks (R E A L L Y ?) writes and makes websites. His argument? The web can be for fun! Not everything must make money! Let’s login and be weird together!</p>
<p>Also, because I have deep seated ~web anxiety~ about not being cool enough online, I wonder if I should make this place messier and wilder…</p>
Castlevania2020-03-07T10:06:56Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/castlevania/<p>Season 3 landed on Netflix yesterday and it’s one of the very few shows that I’ll drop everything for, although I guess that can be said for every Warren Ellis project. That’s because—in classic Ellisian fashion—this season is like a freight train; pulling out of a station slowly to begin, but by the end all the carriages are rushing off a cliff straight into the open maw of hell.</p>
<p>My only wish was that were more stories that felt like this carefully animated comic book on screen.</p>
<p>Also, I wonder why this is a series of ten episodes and not a movie. I guess there might be some research at Netflix that says people will happily munch on ten serialized lunch box sized episodes about anime vampires, but a whole film? Woof! That’s an enormous psychological commitment—no thanks!</p>
<p>Although perhaps it’s an artistic decision, as I know that Ellis loves those cliffhangers that comic books are perhaps the best at rendering. Splitting things into tiny episodes gives you that ability to cut things off, to give the audience a reason to watch the next bit, to keep everyone on the very tips of their toes.</p>
<p>Anyway, if you’re unfamiliar with Warren’s work, you really ought to check out <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Trees-1-Warren-Ellis/dp/1632152703">the first volume of Trees</a>. And then hold on tight.</p>
Writing and lightness2020-03-04T11:06:25Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/writing-and-lightness/<p>The other day I mentioned that I might not be taking writing <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/on-writing">seriously enough</a> and then, in a delightfully bloggish way, Robin Sloan riffed on this idea. He published his own thoughts about <a href="https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/writing-and-lightness">writing and lightness</a> and this part stuck out to me:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I don’t mean to pick on a stray paragraph. It’s just that you encounter this so often: the insistence that writing should be difficult, serious, painful. Blood on the page, all that. For many writers, it’s a key part of their mythologies of themselves.</p>
<p>And writing can be, very often is, all those things; so it’s not wrong.</p>
<p>It’s just incomplete, because writing can also be fun, matter-of-fact, rushed, bonkers, commercial, crass—and totally successful. Anything can work. Not everything does! But the gates of the city are wide open and there are a thousand ways in.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That mythology (about writing having to be painful to be good) was attractive for a long time. Years ago I would hurl myself at the page until my back hurt and my fingers ached. I believed that physical pain and emotional torment would somehow translate into great work. And in the early days of writing the newsletter I would do the same: I wanted to sound like Hitchens or Orwell or Trent Reznor. I wanted to sound important and I wanted the writing to be sad.</p>
<p>But the pain of all that never really helped. In fact, it created nothing but writing that I want to forget.</p>
<p>And then I received the best writing advice I could ask for: one day, <a href="https://julesforrest.com/">Jules</a> read the newsletter and I asked her what she thought—I saw her wince. A pause. And then she replied: “This doesn’t sound like you, I don’t recognize you here. I think you should write just like you talk.”</p>
<p>Whenever I sit down in front of a keyboard I think of this now; I know that I can’t copy the tone and style of other people. And as much as I want to treat the writing seriously, and write something ~important~, I probably shouldn’t. I ought to write as if I’m talking; hopeful, bumbling, hands-waving and heart-skipping all the way.</p>
<p>At least, that’s what works for me.</p>
On Writing2020-03-01T08:59:43Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/on-writing/<p>“Am I taking this seriously enough?” I ask myself. You know, ~this~; the words and the typing, the becoming-a-writer-slowly-over-time thing. I put pen to paper maybe a couple of times a week but do I spend hours a day writing in hopes of being not only good at this thing, but great?</p>
<p>No.</p>
<p>I’m sat on my porch reading and soaking up the sun—freckles galore!—and this annoying book has delivered yet another one-two punch that has me reevaluating how much attention I give to my writing. The book? Oh, I’m reading Stephen King’s <em>On Writing</em> after so many folks have recommended it to me. And page after page of it is like this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair—the sense that you can never completely put on a page what’s in your mind and heart. You can come to the act with your fists clenched and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you or because you want to change the world. Come to it any way but lightly.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’ve treated my writing like this: as a hobby, not a job. I’ve treated it all so very lightly, being caught up in the hubbub of the design and engineering worlds that I forget that those are things I do for rent money but the writing is who I am, unfortunately. But why is this a problem? Well, King argues that stories are “found things, like fossils in the ground.” You have to work to hunt for them, to dig them out of the earth. And if you don’t work hard enough then you’ll never see them for the treasures they might become.</p>
<p>With my writing career I’ve never had a <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/dora">Dora</a> or <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/the-success-of-many-days">Brad</a> shout at me, to lovingly push me to try harder. And so On Writing reminds me that I could be doing so much better than this, that everything up until now has been fine but the work could be dazzling, if only I didn’t treat it all so lightly.</p>
fraidycat2020-02-26T16:57:13Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/fraidycat/<p>Here’s a video essay about “following people from afar on the Internet” called <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgA4GzRsldI&feature=emb_title">Fraidycat</a>, which also happens to be the name of <a href="https://fraidyc.at/">a desktop app and browser extension</a> for following hundreds of people on whatever platform they’re on. If you like an artist on Youtube for example, or a writer and their blog, then Fraidycat will show you a list of all the recent things that they’ve made. It’s designed not to overwhelm you with an endless feed of noise, which the developer and creator of Fraidycat—Kicks Condor (!)—criticizes when he asks this question:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Do you want to trust that these systems [like Facebook or Twitter] will get your message out? Do you trust that they’ll know what’s valuable?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Recently I’ve found that Twitter is a bad medium for following the people I adore on the web and so <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/how-to-read-the-internet">I’ve returned to RSS</a>. It feels so much more...sustainable. It feels healthy, too.</p>
H Is for Hawk2020-02-25T17:52:50Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/h-is-for-hawk/<p>Helen Macdonald’s novel <em>H Is for Hawk</em> is infuriating because it’s overwhelmingly kind and has just the sort of style that I often shoot for in <em>Adventures</em>. It hops and skips along, without a mean bone in its body. There’s so much momentum to every paragraph, every sentence, that you cannot help but become infatuated with Helen’s care for detail.</p>
<p>This is one of those books where I find that I don’t care much for the subject matter (hawks) but you cannot stop me from reading everything Helen has to say about them. This, I feel, is the mark of a truly great book.</p>
<p>Not only that, but it’s about England. Which right now is particularly difficult for me to read about since I haven’t been home in more than a year. Helen writes about the time before Brexit where the signs were in the air, when folks spoke of “Old England,” as if there was a time in the past we could return to. A time of purity and honor.</p>
<p>But Helen says absolutely not:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time, too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead. We live out our three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves. We take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history.</p>
</blockquote>
The Inertia of Bad Ideas2020-02-24T23:29:37Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-inertia-of-bad-ideas/<p>Here’s some good writing advice and <a href="https://hughhowey.com/the-inertia-of-bad-ideas/">tough love</a> from Hugh Howey where he discusses being in a writing room for a TV show and how it applies to his work in books:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I figured out a long time ago that it’s often better to delete entire chapters and start with a blank page than it is to fix a story that’s gone awry. It’s some of the best craft-level writing advice one can receive: Figure out where you were last excited about your story, go back to that point, and try something radically new going forward. Repeat until you remain excited all the way through to the end.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Howey is also opening <a href="https://hughhowey.com/open-for-submissions/">submissions for feedback</a> right now and is making <a href="https://youtu.be/4opLwDGkjzI">a series of videos</a> where he talks about writing and it all seems interesting so far. In fact, I cannot tell you how much I love this form of working in public as it’s just so exciting to me; that potent mix of vulnerability and curiosity! Swoon.</p>
Who the fuck is Guy Debord?2020-02-24T10:48:17Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/bad-writing/<p>Over the Christmas break I read a book about underground places called Underland where Robert Macfarlane investigates mines, caves, burial sites, and even ventures deep into the network of tunnels beneath Paris. For the most part I enjoyed it, yet every so often I found myself wincing and bracing for impact because—out of absolutely nowhere—the writing slips into obnoxious rambling.</p>
<p>Try reading this next bit carefully (I’m sorry):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Just as psychogeographers in the original Parisian Situationist vision of Guy Debord sought to discover astonishment on the terrain of the familiar by breaking out of the grooves of behaviour defined by capital, so politicized urban explorers present their trespasses as activism that ‘recod[es] people’s normalized relationships to city space.’</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What does...any of this mean? What the eff is a psychogeographer and who the fuck is Guy Debord? (I am sorry Guy Debord, this is nothing personal against you, I’m sure you’re swell.) Also, I adore a long, unwieldy sentence from time to time but this bad boy is simply a monster. Why is that though? Well, the writer overwhelms us with smart-sounding nonsense in an attempt to prove how intelligent they are. Yet if you keep your wits about you and look closely you’ll notice how imprecise and waffling the writing truly is. There’s just so much opportunity for revision!</p>
<p>Although most writing is like this, the problem is often hard to spot. That’s because sentences like those above make us feel dumb. We tend to think “yikes I don’t understand any of this so this chap must be smarter than me!” And that’s just what this obfuscatory language is designed to do.</p>
<p>I know I shouldn’t get mad at this one dumb paragraph, but I think this happens when writers stop caring for their audience. And that lack of care is what makes me mad.</p>
<p>And it’s not just in non-fiction books about tunnels where this writing can be found—it’s everywhere! It’s printed on exhibit placards and on the back of novels, or typed out on company slide decks and memos. The stuff can be found in everything written about design or typography and especially in literary criticism (the genre of writing that basically invented this pretentious style). Not to mention public speaking events and political rallies, as they’re rife with this rambling self-serving crap, too.</p>
<p>The reason why I mention this is not to dunk on poor old Robert though, it’s only because I think this is the most important thing for us writers to learn. We must become allergic to it all. We must be ruthless in the edit. We must use the delete key generously. And we must ask so much more from ourselves when we’re writing.</p>
<p>Anyway, after struggling with Underland for a couple of days, I cannot tell you what a relief it was this week when I stumbled upon Harriet McBride Johnson’s piece: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/magazine/unspeakable-conversations.html">Unspeakable conversations</a>. It’s so good that I don’t even know where to begin. Yes, the topic is horrifying and worthy of your attention alone, but I want to focus instead on the way that Harriet writes; the pinpoint precision and lack of any ego or waffling. It’s like a scimitar slicing through butter! Or a steady train composed entirely out of logic, unrelenting, and it’s so beautiful because not a single word is wasted.</p>
<p>Likewise, a few weeks ago <a href="https://torihinn.com/">Tori</a> gave me H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (I am extremely late to this party). But the reason why I bring it up is because every sentence is filled with air and light. There’s no waffling, no rambling. And not a shred of pretense:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In my three years as a Cambridge Fellow there’d been lectures and libraries and college meetings, supervisions, admissions interviews, late nights of paper-writing and essay-marking, and other things soaked in Cantabrigian glamour: eating pheasant by candlelight at High Table while snow dashed itself in flurries against the leaded glass and carols were sung and the port was passed and the silver glittered upon dark-polished refectory tables. Now, standing on a cricket pitch with a hawk in my hand, I knew I had always been falling as I moved past these things.</p>
<p>[...] It strikes me that this must be happiness. That I have remembered what it is, and how it can be done.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ah! Everything here has momentum! And that, in turn, lifts the reader up and brings them along for the ride. In fact, George Saunders wrote about just this feeling—of pulling the reader up and not insulting them—in one of the best pieces of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/04/what-writers-really-do-when-they-write">writing about writing</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You make a rarefied place (rarefied in language, in form; perfected in many inarticulable beauties – the way two scenes abut; a certain formal device that self-escalates; the perfect place at which a chapter cuts off); and then welcome the reader in. She can’t believe that you believe in her that much; that you are so confident that the subtle nuances of the place will speak to her; she is flattered. And they do speak to her. This mode of revision, then, is ultimately about imagining that your reader is as humane, bright, witty, experienced and well intentioned as you, and that, to communicate intimately with her, you have to maintain the state, through revision, of generously imagining her. You revise your reader up, in your imagination, with every pass. You keep saying to yourself: “No, she’s smarter than that. Don’t dishonour her with that lazy prose or that easy notion.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I think this is perhaps the hardest part of writing—of “generously imagining her”—continuously, unendingly. And this is the only difference between good and bad writing in the end. That doesn’t mean it’s easy (being kind is often the hardest thing to do) and of course I mention this not to lecture anyone but only as a keepsake and as a reminder for myself.</p>
<p>As George luminiously summarizes it later in that piece: “...in revising your reader up, you revise yourself up too.”</p>
RSS favorites2020-02-16T14:27:55Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/likes/<p>Dave Rupert mentioned the other day that he had made a page on his website that gathers his most recent <a href="https://daverupert.com/likes/">favorites from Feedbin</a> and lets you scroll through them or even subscribe to them. I thought this was such a great idea that I decided to rip it off entirely!</p>
<p>First up, you’ll need to head to <code>Feedbin</code> <code>></code> <code>Settings</code> <code>></code> <code>Starred article feed</code> and toggle that on. This will create a feed of every post that you star and it’ll then give you a link. Next up you’ll need to write a script that parses that feed URL with JavaScript and this had me a bit stumped as I’ve never done anything like this before. After fiddling around with DevTools I figured out how Dave did it but he mentioned that <a href="https://css-tricks.com/how-to-fetch-and-parse-rss-feeds-in-javascript/">this post by Chris is where he got the idea from</a>.</p>
<p>Here’s <a href="https://codepen.io/robinrendle/pen/a1c68736d5df9451992441e9f1c142e6?editors=1010">the final script</a> but, as Chris mentions in that post, it’s probably best to cache this stuff. Although for now I think this is fine, I’ll figure that step out later.</p>
<p>For now you can head to <a href="https://robinrendle.com/likes.html">/likes</a> to see my favorites or you can use <a href="https://feedbin.com/starred/aLWF-kwUgSwGZ_pDRzeM4w.xml">this link</a> to subscribe to them if that’s your jam.</p>
Agile as Trauma2020-02-12T13:40:43Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/Agile-as-Trauma/<p>Dorian Taylor has written an outstanding piece about <a href="https://doriantaylor.com/agile-as-trauma">making software and project management</a>. He rushes out of the gate with the following sentence:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Agile Manifesto is an immune response on the part of programmers to bad management.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I could not agree more. In fact, I think this piece about making software is the best thing I’ve read in a rather long time. Particularly on the subject of collaboration, where Dorian argues that it’s not always a good thing:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>So</em> much effort goes into writing and talking about collaboration, and creating tools to facilitate collaboration and telecollaboration, with the tacit assumption that more collaboration is always better. <a href="http://www.oopsla.org/podcasts/Keynote_FrederickBrooks.mp3#t=535">To quote Frederick Brooks</a>, the more collaboration the better “is far from a self-evident proposition and certainly not universally true.” True indeed, to the extent that collaboration divides labour, but questionable as a fraction of one’s activity. Since communication overhead increases proportionally the square of the number of people on the team—a fact illuminated by Brooks in the 1970s—what you actually want is as little collaboration as you can get away with.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>On this note, and in my experience, there has never been a meeting with more than 7 people in it that has been useful. At a certain point the more collaboration that takes place, the slower and the worse product development gets. Instead, we need to build teams that work almost entirely independently of one another.</p>
<p>I see that in much of my design systems work it’s about trying to reduce communication and collaboration: to get folks to stop being in meetings, asking questions about which color to use when, and to just push forward in their own direction independently.</p>
<p>Also, this reminds me of <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/a-vacuum-of-courage.html">the vacuum of courage</a>.</p>
Craig Mod on Membership2020-02-03T19:48:08Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/craig-mod-membership/<p>This is an interesting and honest post by Craig Mod on <a href="https://craigmod.com/essays/membership_programs/">how his paid membership program faired in 2019</a>. He breaks down his costs and what advice he would give to other writers/artists who are interested in becoming more independent. I particularly like this bit, too:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am tremendously grateful to everyone who has joined. I realize not everyone can afford to join, and I realize we’re all a bit bombarded by “memberships” and “subscriptions” these days. But ultimately — this is a good thing! A scant ten years ago this ecosystem barely existed. Now it’s ever-more normalized. This feels healthy. Directly supporting writers, artists, musicians, software developers, et cetera, feels like the final remaining puzzle piece of the last 30 years of independent creation. Computers democratized design in the ’80s/’90s, the web democratized publishing in the ’00s, and now proper payments infrastructure is democratizing creative sustainability.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’ve been thinking along these lines and with <em>Adventures</em> for some time now. I somewhat like that there’s no money that crosses hands with my newsletter since it’s for fun and I don’t want it to be a job. But with that said, I often imagine what it could become if I threw more time and energy into that project.</p>
People > Process2020-01-21T17:40:50Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/people-process/<p>Paul wrote <a href="https://paulrobertlloyd.com/2020/01/people_process">this lovely piece</a> that riffs on my thoughts about <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/why-software-is-slow-and-shitty">why software is bad</a> and the the cool thing about it? Paul disagrees with me! He argues in part that building great software will always require some degree of communication and planning:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m currently helping design a service for the Department for Education, work which I consider to the be the most rewarding of my career too. But here’s the thing: we have plenty of process!</p>
<p>[...] even with all this structure, I believe we are building a valuable, robust, accessible and inclusive service — albeit one built upon a foundation of government tooling and prevailing delivery-focused culture.</p>
<p>If I’ve learnt anything working in this industry, its that if you don’t hire good people — by which I mean not only talented in their own domain, but able to work and communicate with others — any process will soon become a crutch.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I love this kind of back-and-forth blogging! But of course I jest about the disagreement here, as Paul fleshes out a lot of the ideas I glossed over in my rant-induced post. Planning is important and communication is vital for any team, and you certainly don’t want great people working in silos. But I guess I just don’t hear enough about how the planning part of software development is to some degree a threat to the software itself, and often the process around it all is done for the sake of fragile egos. Not to make a better product.</p>
<p>When the process is developed by the team, like in Paul’s case above? Wonderful! Great! I’m all for it. But when the team is driven by management and people without context required to do the planning effectively? That’s when the process has become more important than the people.</p>
<p>And that’s when something has gone terribly wrong.</p>
Why Software is Slow and Shitty2020-01-19T19:08:43Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/why-software-is-slow-and-shitty/<p>Although I’ve argued before that <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/the-dashboard-problem">software development is suffering from extreme mismanagement</a>, I hadn’t thought much about how the structure of a company plays into the quality of the software; the way tasks are filtered down to underlings, the way that decisions are made, the thick layer of mismanagement in between. So I was surprised to find myself nodding along to <a href="http://pketh.org/why-software-is-slow-and-shitty.html">this blog post</a> over the weekend about why software is almost universally bad (and I will gently place the majority of websites into this bucket, too). But here’s the kicker: most companies are simply not structured properly to make good software in the first place.</p>
<p>Huh!</p>
<p>The author references <em>Super Mario 64</em> as an example of great software and the reason why the game was so damn good wasn’t luck—it was because they structured the company to make a good videogame:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You might think that Mario 64 was built with tickets and sprints, but, according to interviews, there was no master plan, only the principles that the game should feel good and be fun. They started with just Mario in a small room, and tuned his animations and physics until he felt nice and responsive. After that, the levels were also created as they went, with the designers, developers, and director going back and forth using sketches and prototypes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>My own time in a Silicon Valley startup has proved this much to be true; planning doesn’t make for better software. In fact today our design systems team doesn’t have sprints, we don’t have tickets or a daily standup. Each day we come to work, figure out what’s the most important thing that we could be doing, and then we—gasp!—actually do it. We have one meeting a week but we constantly talk about our work together like <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/partners-in-crime">detectives solving a crime</a>.</p>
<p>No one gives us work to do, we independently solve problems at a blistering pace, and without an added layer of bullshit planning on top it’s become the greatest work I’ve contributed to in my career so far. (Of course our team is not perfect but we correct things incredibly quickly when we notice something going off the rails and that to me is what I love the most.)</p>
<p>But watching so many other teams slowly flail about whilst they plan for quarter 3.2 of subplan A, whilst our team produces more work in a week than they all do combined in a quarter has been shocking to me. I now know that most companies are not organized for employees to do great work. Companies are organized in the way that they are so that managers can hide in the system, so that responsibility for tough decisions can be delegated, so that no-one can be blamed for royally fucking things up.</p>
<p>The software is hardly taken into consideration.</p>
<p>After four years of working in a large startup, I know what I always assumed was true: you don’t need a plan to make a beautiful thing. You really don’t. In fact, there’s a point where overplanning can be a signal of inexperience and fear and bullshit. The scrum board and the sprints and the inane meetings each and every day are not how you build another <em>Super Mario 64</em>.</p>
<p>Instead all you have to do is hire smart people, trust them to do their best work, and then get the hell out of their way.</p>
Redesigning in public2020-01-17T23:02:08Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/redesigning-in-public/<p>Jonnie Hallman’s <a href="https://destroytoday.com/">newly redesigned personal site</a> is rather lovely as it’s sort of like a little essay all about him and his work. It’s the perfect introduction to the history of his web design and development career and I might steal a bunch of his ideas for a redesign of my own. Anyway, he’s been blogging consistently in small bursts about <a href="https://destroytoday.com/blog">the redesign process</a> and I love everything about it.</p>
<p>Likewise, Frank Chimero’s redesign for his blog has been just as fascinating. Frank’s been building it all very slowly and meticulously too, documenting his decisions such as <a href="https://frankchimero.com/blog/2020/picking-typefaces/">picking typefaces</a> and why he’s doing this <a href="https://frankchimero.com/blog/2020/popeye/">out in the open</a> so publicly:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...the web, by and large, has become a dumping ground for garbage. Most design content has become poor quality, surface-level content marketing that does more damage than good, because it offers over-simplified, misinformed perspectives dressed up as guidance. One hardly gets the sensation of lived experience and professional acumen in the words. When the experienced don’t write, grifters step in, feign expertise, and sell it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I feel like my problem with design in general today is that folks want to burn everything to the ground and start again all the time. Whether that’s with a website, or a new web standard, or a political policy. They don’t want to fix what’s wrong with things bit by bit, everyone wants Thing 2.0 whilst jumping over all the small improvements that are required to get there.</p>
<p>And I think that’s what I find so exciting about Jonnie and Frank’s writing—progress is made slowly today. Step by step.</p>
CWRU2K2020-01-17T21:01:37Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/cwru2k/<p>I love <a href="https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2020/01/01/cwru2k/">this story from Eric Meyer</a> about building a website that looks as if it was from the 1900s and almost getting fired in the process:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The young’uns in the audience won’t remember this, but to avoid loss of data and services when the year rolled from 1999 to 2000, pretty much the entire computer industry was engaged in a deep audit of every computer and program under our care. There’s really been nothing quite like it, before or since, but the job got done. In fact, it got done so well, barely anything adverse happened and some misguided people now think it was all a hoax designed to extract hefty consulting fees, instead of the successful global preventative effort it actually was.</p>
<p>As for us, pretty much everything on the Web side was fine. And then, in the middle of one of our staff meetings about Y2K certification, John Sully said something to the effect of, “Wouldn’t it be funny if the Web server suddenly thought it was 1900 and you had to use a telegraph to connect to it?”</p>
<p>We all laughed and riffed on the concept for a bit and then went back to Serious Work Topics, but the idea stuck in my head. What would a 1900-era Web site look like?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>On the 1st of January 2000, Eric’s alternate universe website had the warning:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Despite our best efforts at averting Y2K problems, it seems that our Web server now believes that it is January of 1900. Please be advised that we are working diligently on the problem and hope to have it fixed soon.</p>
</blockquote>
How to be an open source gardener2020-01-09T15:47:32Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/open-source-gardener/<p>I love this piece by Steve Klabnik on <a href="https://words.steveklabnik.com/how-to-be-an-open-source-gardener">how to care for an open source community</a>. He writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...without someone actively paying attention, it’s only a matter of time before things get unseemly. If you’re looking to help out an open source project, it’s not a glamorous job, but all it takes is a little bit of work, and developing a habit.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There’s a lot in here that I think relates to design systems work where the job is about being meticulous in very peculiar ways (whenever I start a project now I’ll always squint at it from every angle to try and figure out if it needs a spreadsheet or not).</p>
The empty promises of Marie Kondo and the craze for minimalism2020-01-09T11:38:30Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/empty-promises-marie-kondo/<p>Kyle Chayka on <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jan/03/empty-promises-marie-kondo-craze-for-minimalism">the empty promise of minimalism</a> and our obsession with it all:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The iPhone’s function depends on an enormous, complex, ugly superstructure of satellites and undersea cables that certainly are not designed in pristine whiteness. Minimalist design encourages us to forget everything a product relies on and imagine, in this case, that the internet consists of carefully shaped glass and steel alone.</p>
<p>[...] Similarly, we might be able to hold the iPhone in our hands, but we should also be aware that the network of its consequences is vast: server farms absorbing massive amounts of electricity, Chinese factories where workers die by suicide, devastated mud pit mines that produce tin. It is easy to feel like a minimalist when you can order food, summon a car or rent a room using a single brick of steel and silicon. But in reality, it is the opposite. We are taking advantage of a maximalist assemblage. Just because something looks simple does not mean it is; the aesthetics of simplicity cloak artifice, or even unsustainable excess.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Maximalist. Assemblage. Woof.</p>
Start with the drama2019-12-21T18:42:05Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/start-with-the-drama/<p>I reckon every good story begins halfway through. One example is the first scene of <em>Uncharted 2</em>: we don’t see our protagonist Nathan Drake at the train station buying his ticket, grabbing a coffee, hopping on the train, finding his seat, taking off his coat, and then finally settling down for the trip. Instead, the game cuts to Drake waking up in his seat upside down with the train teetering on the edge of a cliff in the Himalayas; suitcases are crashing down all around him and into the open maw of a giant canyon.</p>
<p>This reminds me that there’s only one writing tip worth paying attention to: always start with the drama.</p>
<p>Sure, you can begin your story at the train station if you like, but if we start with the drama and then trust the reader to figure out what happened it ends up being so much more satisfying.</p>
<p>This writing tip applies to video games as much as it does to books, blog posts, and film: <em>A New Hope</em> begins with two ships in chase. Within half a minute we understand what’s going on without the need for a single word to be spoken or an introductory preamble as to which ship is which. I could go on endlessly with examples. In fiction? “Call me Ishmael.” But wait—who is this? Where am I? What is going on? I have no earthly idea, but tell me more!</p>
<p>Beginning in the middle of a story is a cheap but effective trick and it took me about a decade to figure out. You can tell in my early writing that I want to make sure the reader is tagging along for the ride with giant rambling introductions, but it always feels patronizing. I would try to set things up from every angle yet this produces writing that just isn’t exciting to read. You’re left with a story that’s stuck in the dirt with the tires spinning.</p>
<p>Today I always jump halfway into whatever point I’m trying to make for two reasons. First, this jolts the reader awake. “<em>Pay attention!</em>” the introductory sentence should declare. Second, I jump into the middle so that I can then enjoy the fun of trying to explain my way out of it. And one small example of this done well is the introduction to an essay that I wrote years ago all about <a href="https://robinrendle.com/essays/a-visual-lexicon.html">typography and graphic design</a>:</p>
<p><em>“First you notice the letter.”</em></p>
<p>What does that mean? Who is <em>you</em>? What is this whole thing about and what the heck has this got to do with anything? Where am I? Eh?</p>
<p>This essay could’ve started like any other blog post or book or television show about design: “Typography is all around us. It’s the art of visualizing the way that...” blah blah blah! Screw everything about all of that. Instead: throw me in the deep end because otherwise why should I care?</p>
<p>All of this is to say that we need to stop patronizing our readers by explaining everything away. If we start halfway through the story where the drama is thickest we can leave a bit of mystery behind, and the readers can be trusted to fill in the gaps for themselves.</p>
“Link in Bio” is a Slow Knife2019-12-13T14:48:49Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/link-in-bio-is-a-slow-knife/<p>Anil Dash writing about how Instagram is controlling behavior by <a href="https://anildash.com/2019/12/10/link-in-bio-is-how-they-tried-to-kill-the-web/">limiting the use of hyperlinks</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If anyone on Instagram can just link to any old store on the web, how can Instagram — meaning Facebook, Instagram’s increasingly-overbearing owner — tightly control commerce on its platform? If Instagram users could post links willy-nilly, they might even be able to connect directly to their users, getting their email addresses or finding other ways to communicate with them. Links represent a threat to closed systems.</p>
</blockquote>
The Birth of a Nation2019-12-12T10:42:52Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-birth-of-a-nation/<p>About a year ago I saw the trailer for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i18z1EQCoyg"><em>The Birth of a Nation</em></a> and I was, for whatever reason, thoroughly unimpressed with the pacing and structure of it. The music doesn’t make you scared or anxious or provide any of the emotional <em>oomph</em> that’s required of a film about slavery. The trailer certainly has some lovely cinematography and what not, but there’s no <em>energy</em> to the way the images are presented. It’s not telling a story. And for whatever reason that annoyed me, all that potential that’s just left there out in the open.</p>
<p>So! One night I couldn’t sleep and I decided to make a remix, mostly as a challenge to try and fix the pacing but also to convince myself to make weird and wild things again. So after downloading the movie and picking one of my favorite songs at the time, I stitched the scenes back together and made the following trailer:</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<figure class="m-wrapper--unpadded">
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vcmprGTaTrg" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
</div>
<p>It’s certainly not perfect, and it’s rather clunky in parts, but there’s a few mashups of image and audio that I still love here — when the man lifts his hat and the piano stumbles into the scene for a moment, especially.</p>
<p>Anyway, it’s fun to do things that are just for yourself, without any hope of trying to making a dime off of it, or boosting your career, or grabbing attention. A thing can be, like, just a <em>thing</em>. You know? Yeah. I miss that.</p>
The Measure of Success2019-12-10T13:00:17Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/measure-of-success/<p><em>What does success look like?</em> I asked him in the dim light. A jazz band was playing on the mezzanine behind us and I was slumped at the bar in a half-drunken stupor, moaning triumphantly about everything. I whined about how I’d trained myself to see likes, faves, retweets, and hearts as the measure of my life. And how I’d spent the best part of a decade looking at the rectangle in my pocket light up with recognition; I had scrolled endlessly through feeds looking for myself, waiting for attention that, when it came, it always felt a little cold. A little hollow.</p>
<p>Now I had begun to question the stats, but leaving those measurements of success behind felt like my career had begun to stall precipitously with them. And so I asked JB, perhaps the smartest and most talented person that I know, for advice.</p>
<p><em>What does success really look like?</em></p>
<p>He didn’t have an answer, as he was still trying to figure that out for himself, too. And so we just sat at the fancy bar and nursed our drinks in silence for a moment until we began laughing again—a joke is one step behind us, always—and as the evening and the lights and the cocktails blended together into a luminous broth I forgot about the question altogether.</p>
<p>Yet now, after years of thinking about this question, I might now have an answer. On this rainy day in San Francisco last week it suddenly hit me that I think I know what success is (maybe, hopefully, perhaps, I think, I hope).</p>
<p>Success is a pile of books on my desk; written, published, and designed by my friends.</p>
The Hiding Place2019-12-08T10:00:49Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-hiding-place/<p>Robert McFarlane has written an outstanding piece on the dangers and difficulty of <a href="https://psmag.com/ideas/the-hiding-place-inside-the-worlds-first-long-term-storage-facility-for-highly-radioactive-nuclear-waste">disposing with radioactive waste</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Deep in the bedrock of Olkiluoto Island in southwest Finland a tomb is under construction. The tomb is intended to outlast not only the people who designed it, but also the species that designed it. It is intended to maintain its integrity without future maintenance for 100,000 years, able to endure a future ice age. One hundred thousand years ago three major river systems flowed across the Sahara. One hundred thousand years ago anatomically modern humans were beginning their journey out of Africa. The oldest pyramid is around 4,600 years old; the oldest surviving church building is fewer than 2,000 years old.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>After reading this post I immediately picked up Robert’s book <em>Underland: A Deep Time Journey</em> which this piece is only an excerpt of and I can’t wait to dig into it. I find the way that Robert writes is lyrical and dances along to a rather lovely beat whilst never losing focus, and that happens to be an extremely difficult trick to balance whilst writing.</p>
<p>Take the introduction to this piece, for example:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Birches, birches, pines, birches, clearing, blue farmhouse. Low river valley, wooden bridge. Everything frozen: rivers, trees, turf, fields. Pink crag of granite, yellow ice-fall spilling from it. Boulders big as houses between the birches, among the pines. Black crow pulling red flesh off the white ribs of a dead fox. Jackdaw, jackdaw.</p>
<p><em>This is not a place for you</em>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Lovely! Without any connective tissue between the words all that’s left is a flash of images as you read—like the <em>click</em> of a camera snapping between shots. (Also, unrelatedly, this is just the sort of effect I was hoping for in <em><a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/berlin-indefinitely">Berlin, indefinitely</a></em> a good while back.)</p>
Teaching CSS2019-12-01T22:40:18Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/teaching-css/<p>Rachel Andrew has written all about her career <a href="https://css-tricks.com/teaching-css/">helping developers learn CSS</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As I started my CSS layout journey with a backdrop of people complaining about Netscape 4, I now continue against a backdrop of people whining about IE11. As our industry grows up, I would love to see us leaving these complaints behind. I think that this starts with us teaching CSS as a robust language, one which has been designed to allow us to present information to multiple environments, to many different people, via a sea of ever-changing devices.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Some things change, but most things don’t.</p>
The Quiet Redesign2019-11-30T21:13:48Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-quiet-redesign/<p>Earlier this week I flew down to a friend’s home in Anaheim for Thanksgiving and, in between home made apple pies and far too much turkey, I found time to update the design of this ol’ place a bit. Now I’m using Klim Type’s <a href="https://klim.co.nz/collections/soehne/">Söhne</a> for headings and the ever-so-lovely <a href="https://klim.co.nz/retail-fonts/newzald/">Newzald</a> for body copy and blockquotes. The new design is <em>extremely</em> first year graphic design student: everything is black with that giant sans and it all says “hello, yes, I’m moving to New York!” (Although I’m not.)</p>
<p>I wouldn’t really say this is a redesign though, as I’ve just improved the typesetting so it ought to be considerably easier to read. I think the interesting thing about this is how will this feel? Does this dark-mode-esque style suit my writing? Does the bold sans and declarative <em>oomph</em> of Söhne match my tone and voice? Will this design change my writing in some way?</p>
<p>These are all questions that I’m excited to find answers to.</p>
End of year optimism2019-11-22T09:43:05Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/end-of-year-thoughts/<p>Over on CSS-Tricks, Chris asked a ton of web designers and developers <a href="https://css-tricks.com/category/2019-end-of-year-thoughts/">what interested them this year when it comes to building websites</a> and the results are lovely! The overwhelming amount of positivity and charm in these posts reminds me of the Old Web when we all felt like that we were contributing to something grand together, as <a href="https://css-tricks.com/what-the-web-still-is/">Eric Bailey writes</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In addition to being responsive, the web works across a huge range of form factors, device capabilities, and specialized browsing modes. The post you are currently reading can show up on a laptop, a phone, a Kindle, a TV, a gas station pump, a video game console, a refrigerator, a car, a billboard, an oscilloscope—heck, even a space shuttle (if you’re reading this from space, please, please, <em>please</em> let me know).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Every article in this collection stands up on the tips of its toes and boldly states why the web is worth building and preserving for the future. But this makes me wish that I had written something a bit more positive for <a href="https://css-tricks.com/no-absolutely-not/">my own end of year thoughts</a>, where I wrote about restraint:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The true beauty of web design is that you can pick up HTML, CSS, and the basics of JavaScript within a dedicated week or two. But over the past year, I’ve come to the conclusion that building a truly great website doesn’t require much skill and it certainly doesn't require years to figure out how to perform the coding equivalent of a backflip.</p>
<p>What you need to build a great website is restraint.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Even though I stand by what I said in this post, I think that writing with great doses of negativity is <em>real</em> easy. And that’s because it’s also the cheapest way to fame and success; there are endless articles dunking on JavaScript or how <em>weird</em> and <em>dumb</em> CSS can be. And I sometimes fear that I’ve contributed to that discourse to some degree perhaps.</p>
<p>We all have a responsibility to be kind and useful with our writing.</p>
<p>And that’s because with every sentence we type—every character and punctuation mark even—is an opportunity. That relentless, un-ending pessimism we see can be washed away by our charm and enthusiasm, one key at a time.</p>
O2019-11-15T19:25:28Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/o/<p>I could be halfway towards LA or Vegas by now. I could be tearing it through a canyon in Yosemite. Instead, it’s midnight and I’m sat on my bike in front of O’s apartment with the engine rattling beneath me. I’m about to walk through that front door and kiss her and pick her up and yet somehow I will feel lonelier than if I was by myself.</p>
<p>What the fuck am I doing?</p>
<p>Sure, yes, okay. I know this isn’t love. But I’m confused because I feel all the intensity that comes with falling in love; that sixth sense of being in just the right room at just the right time, that feeling of each joke click-clacking together like they do in sitcoms.</p>
<p>I have no idea what this is but it certainly is not love. This is the relationship equivalent of getting high; an intellectual dead end.</p>
<p>I know that when I hop off my bike and walk through that door I’m going to be disappointed because I will always want more than I can have; kindness and mutual respect. But she will never feel the same, despite everything appearing to snap together in that love-at-first-sight sort of way.</p>
<p>As time passes though I discover that I’m not in love with her and I never really was. She is...a bad person. Toxic, even. The personification of the giant ride hailing service that she works for. Kindness is not the priority, only pure, raw efficiency. Yet I find myself thinking a lot about what I miss and after weeks of not seeing her now I realize that what I miss is me; within ten feet of O I was invincible. I could rob a bank with a smile and a ballpoint pen.</p>
<p>In this way I sort of tricked myself. I let my own confidence and charm get the best of me and became so blinded to all the signs of a relationship gone toxic.</p>
<p>But now, I guess, I know this isn’t love.</p>
The Smallest Difference2019-11-12T20:38:04Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-smallest-difference/<p>In July the design systems team at Gusto shipped a beautiful thing. Over the course of three months we tried our best not just to update the brand assets, such as logos, colors, and fonts—we also felt that this was an opportunity to give every component in our library an upgrade. We hoped to expand the scope of the project by removing a ton of duplicate components and tech debt, as well as begin tackling a number of longstanding issues with accessibility, too.</p>
<p>One thing that had been bothering me for quite some time though was the design of our tables and I eagerly waited for the moment to jump in and fix them. This is what they looked like just before the brand refresh work started in earnest:</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<figure class="m-wrapper--unpadded">
<img class="chrome-shadow" alt="The table component in the Gusto component library" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/table.jpg" loading="lazy" />
</figure>
</div>
<p>When you drop this in a design doc like Figma then there’s not much to be worried about. I can read everything here! But as soon as you fill the component with real data then things quickly get bonkers.</p>
<p>And that’s because at Gusto we’re helping companies run payroll, some of whom have dozens of employees, and so we’re constantly presenting our customers with lots of complex information, like their employee’s salary breakdown as well as federal, state and local taxes. This means that our table component is extremely important to our customers and on the design systems team we have to ensure that we provide a component that works well in data-dense situations like this:</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<figure class="m-wrapper--unpadded">
<img class="chrome-shadow" alt="The table component with a lot of data" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/gusto-table-big.jpg" loading="lazy" />
</figure>
</div>
<p>During user research we found that our customers are skimming through this sea of numbers to make sense of it all. Did this employee get paid correctly? Do all these taxes look correct? What have I inevitably messed up? Unfortunately there’s only so much we can do in terms of UX to make the tax system here less peculiar—however!—there’s one UI issue that had been bugging me for years that I knew would help.</p>
<p>First we have to dive into how numbers in a font actually work though.</p>
<p>In most fonts, numbers are not all the same width by default. So a 4 is likely going to be wider than a 1. And this isn’t an issue most of the time; when we’re using numbers in a sentence that’s not really a problem. We sort of don’t care in these scenarios that $1,235.55 is wider or shorter than $9,993.24.</p>
<figure>
<img class="chrome-shadow" alt="An example showing how each number is a different size" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/number-widths.png" loading="lazy" />
</figure>
<p>But in any other context when you’re summing up numbers, like in tables, it’s a complete nightmare because the decimal point will align with different numbers, even if they’re right aligned. This means that when you’re scanning a table that a $1000.00 can suddenly begin to look a lot like $100.00.</p>
<p>Look very closely at the following example and get your nose up right up to the screen to see how things don’t align correctly:</p>
<figure>
<img class="chrome-shadow" alt="Showing how decimals don’t align properly with numbers of different sizes" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/decimals.jpg" loading="lazy" />
</figure>
<p>These are the same number styles! The only difference between the example on the top and the bottom is that they use different glyphs; they’re the same font with the same letterspacing.</p>
<p>Ideally what we want is every number to align correctly and the decimal point to be in the same position each time to allow for better legibility. The good news is that we’ve had ways in which to fix this on the web for years now! With OpenType features within webfonts we can use alternate characters, built directly into many fonts, and we can turn this option on in CSS like so:</p>
<pre><code>.table {
font-variant-numeric: tabular-nums;
}
</code></pre>
<p>To activate these numbers in Figma you’ll need to select some text and head on over to the OpenType features in the right hand navigation (also this is how things currently look, this menu is likely to change in the future):</p>
<figure>
<img alt="Figma’s OpenType menu" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/figma-opentype-example.jpg" loading="lazy" />
</figure>
<p>It’s also important to note that not every font will support this so make sure to double check with the foundry or webfont service beforehand. But anyway! The before and after don’t look all that different when you compare the default figures (left) with the tabular option turned on (right):</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<figure class="m-wrapper--unpadded">
<img alt="Comparing default and tabular numbers" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/figure-comparison.png" loading="lazy" />
</figure>
</div>
<p>You can see how the decimal will now always be in the same position, and you’ll notice how here in the Centra font that the <code>1</code> will look quite different in this OpenType variant. But you’ll only really begin to see the differences in large columns, and especially in tables:</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<figure class="m-wrapper--unpadded">
<img class="chrome-shadow" alt="Switching between tabular and regular numbers" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/table-animation.gif" loading="lazy" />
</figure>
</div>
<p>I think this is a pretty substantial difference! Whereas before each number blurred into the background, when the tabular options is enabled it’s easier to scan and it’s easier to make complex decisions about the data we’re seeing here.</p>
<p>All of a sudden there is a little bit more order to all these numbers and it’s only when you compare the two that you begin to see that the smallest difference in a UI can really make all the difference.</p>
Improving my workflow2019-11-09T22:37:46Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/Improving-my-workflow/<p>The biggest problem with having your own blog is that it’s pretty difficult to write and publish anything. You likely don’t have a fancy Medium-style interface if you want complete control over every little detail and you’re probably writing things from within a CMS or a code editor.</p>
<p>Right now I’m writing this blog post from within <a href="https://code.visualstudio.com/">VS Code</a> for example:</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<figure class="m-wrapper--unpadded">
<img alt="A screenshot of VS Code" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/vs-code-example.jpg" loading="lazy" />
</figure>
</div>
<p>Even though I think that blogging is essential to becoming a better writer, the process around the writing can be super annoying and right now requires a ton of manual work for me. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve noticed how this process is actively hindering me from sharing links, quick ideas, or even embarassing relationship melodrama (oh, you’re <em>very</em> welcome).</p>
<p>Just look at this nightmare blogging process:</p>
<ol>
<li>Open up VS Code and the workspace <code>robinrendle.com</code>.</li>
<li>Create the file name <code>improving-my-workflow.md</code> inside <code>/_posts</code>.</li>
<li>Go to another file and copy/paste the metadata to the top of this one.</li>
<li>Add the title and the correct date.</li>
<li>Write the dang blog post.</li>
<li>Push that code to the master branch so Netlify can publish.</li>
</ol>
<p>Steps 1 through 4 are just far too much effort as the goal of any good blogging system should be to publish things as easily and as quickly as possible; ideally I should be spending all of my time and attention on the writing instead.</p>
<p>So today I decided to tackle this problem once and for all. Right away I knew that I could experiment with <a href="https://www.alfredapp.com/">Alfred’s Workflows</a>; this lets you make little programs when you activate Alfred (so for me that’s <code>cmd</code> + <code>space</code>). What I wanted was to open up Alfred and then create a new file depending on the keyword I gave it and then I wanted it to automatically boot VS Code up with that new file. That way I could skip all those annoying steps entirely!</p>
<p>After about ten minutes of tinkering with it all, I came up with the following workflow:</p>
<ol>
<li>The Alfred extension takes the keyword I pass it after typing <code>b</code> (oh and <code>b</code> stands for blog).</li>
<li>It replaces each space in the keyword with a hypen.</li>
<li>Then that output is set to a variable called <code>filename</code>.</li>
<li>Create a text file with an extension of <code>.md</code> and add the default meta data, including the current date to the top of the file.</li>
<li>Open that file in VS Code.</li>
<li>Alfred will then post a notification that everything is complete!</li>
</ol>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<figure class="m-wrapper--unpadded">
<video alt="A video of this new blogging workflow with Alfred" loading="lazy" autoplay="" loop="">
<source src="https://robinrendle.com/images/a-new-blog-post.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
</video>
</figure>
</div>
<p>It’s pretty nifty that this only took me ten minutes to figure out. Since I’ll be using this command pretty much every day I also decided to <a href="https://thenounproject.com/icon/2021913/">pick up an icon</a> from the Noun Project as the thumbnail for this new workflow, too. Oh and this is what it looks like to make a program in Alfred’s UI:</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<figure class="m-wrapper--unpadded">
<img alt="The Alfred Workflow" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/alfred-workflow.jpg" loading="lazy" />
</figure>
</div>
<p>Anyway, now it takes all of three seconds to start blogging! And so I would highly recommend you invest a bit of time to make your own experience easier—whether that’s updating the back-end of your blog, or cleaning up the styles, or making a tiny tool like this to encourage you to write.</p>
<p>Because blogging is back, baby!</p>
Stab a Book, the Book Won’t Die2019-11-08T15:13:11Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/stab-a-book/<blockquote>
<p>If habits define identity, then given the amount of time so many of us devote to reloading Twitter, opening Netflix, checking reddit, et cetera, are most of our identities that of media addict?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This essay by Craig Mod about <a href="https://craigmod.com/essays/media_accounting/">the resilience of books</a> deals with how we’re forsaking our attention and intelligence for short-term stimulus and shitty feedback loops. But really, secretly, Craig is concerned with what effects our culture is having on our identity. Are these loops making us better people?</p>
<p>I think we all know the answer to that question, before we even read anything that Craig has to say:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...identity change (via an ever increasing belief in both your goal identity itself and the processes by which that identity is formed) happens as a cascade of incremental 1% changes in positive or negative directions. Opportunities for this percent change present themselves dozens of times a day. The best way to guarantee success is by preemptively engineering systems to reduce friction for positive habits, and increase friction for negative ones. Carrying a Kindle and blocking most media on my phone are two core pieces to my system of maintaining, believing in, and strengthening my identity as a “reader” and maintaining what I consider “healthy” contracts with apps and media.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>On this note, I think I’m a very inconsistent reader. I’m happiest when I’m half-way through a book—and when I’m up until the middle of the night reading in giant gulps—and I like who I am as a person in these sparse moments of literacy. But it’s easier to binge a whole season of <em>Letterkenny</em> in a single evening or to watch another dozen bad reviews of <em>Death Stranding</em>.</p>
<p>Craig describes these actions, these habits, as contracts that we’ve unwittingly signed:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Choose active media, set yourself up to succeed by building systems to cultivate positive habits, but most importantly: Take a second to think about the contracts you’ve entered into as you go about your day. Are those contracts you’re happy with? Did you realize you had entered into them?</p>
</blockquote>
Start a newsletter2019-11-07T09:13:33Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/start-a-newsletter/<p>Giving advice about design systems is almost impossible. Every team and codebase is wildly different from one another and what works for one company <em>now</em> might not work for the same company in the near future. I’ve noticed this at Gusto too, where lessons that I learned in the very beginning no longer apply to what our team has become.</p>
<p>That’s to say that design systems work is super weird!</p>
<p>However, if there is only one bit of advice that I would apply to every company and every design systems team no matter what it’s this: you need to start writing and publishing an internal newsletter about design systems.</p>
<p>Thanks to Brad Azevedo, a front-end engineer on our design systems team at Gusto, we’ve been publishing these newsletters on a semi-regular basis now. We write about what’s shipped in our library, any updates to components we’ve made, as well as any challenges we’re facing at that moment in time. And almost immediately we noticed a change in how our team is viewed across the company; engineers started reaching out to us for more advice and feedback, leads began looping us into more conversations earlier on in the process, and designers have started to work with our team to develop components that can be shared across our system.</p>
<p>I would say that this humble newsletter is perhaps the best thing our team has done for quite some time. And you should start one, too.</p>
<h2 id="design-systems-is-a-million-problems-poorly-defined" tabindex="-1">Design systems is a million problems poorly defined <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/start-a-newsletter/#design-systems-is-a-million-problems-poorly-defined" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>One of the strangest things about a design systems team at a company is that it’s not really a product team, but a platform team instead. This means that a lot of the work that a team does on a day to day basis is incredibly boring, infrastructure work, and almost all of it is invisible and under the hood. Most of this work will go entirely unnoticed by anyone else in the org, despite how crucial that work might be if the company wants a healthy design system.</p>
<p>One example might be refactoring the styles of your core web app, or adding documentation for a <code>Card</code> component. These small projects solve minor problems today but over weeks and months they build up into <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/the-success-of-many-days">something remarkable</a>. However! The problem with a lot of this work is that it doesn’t impact designers and engineers at your company today. And that lack of visibility makes things difficult for other teams on the outside to learn what your design systems team is doing and why. This, in turn, will make it harder to make hiring requests, to get buy-in for a design system, and to encourage folks to come to Design Systems when they need it.</p>
<p>Over the past couple of months our team has been listening to every designer and engineer at Gusto to get their feedback about what we’re doing right and wrong. And we’ve heard a flurry of questions from them: How does this work impact my team? What is Design Systems up to? What is the component library? Why did you change this one component or this particular page? And despite our incredible velocity and the wonderful changes our small team is shipping each week, some designers and engineers even felt that we weren’t doing anything at all!</p>
<p>So a few weeks ago we thought about ways to tackle these communication and transparency problems. We saw how some design systems teams at other companies have an internal web app that has a list of everything they’re working on for that quarter. Others have written about the benefits of office hours, too. But neither of these solutions felt like they could solve this problem alone. Instead, we started making notes about everything that we’d been working on and everything that we’d been fixing that week.</p>
<p>Today our newsletter writing begins in Notion, where we make a scrappy list to help us chat about things:</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<figure class="m-wrapper--unpadded">
<img class="chrome-shadow" alt="The Notion app with our notes for the newsletter" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/notion-newsletter.png" loading="lazy" />
</figure>
</div>
<p>This is just a place where we can argue privately about what we want to discuss and what’s worth mentioning. But this leads to something that’s even more important than the content, perhaps.</p>
<h2 id="figuring-out-the-tone-and-audience" tabindex="-1">Figuring out the tone and audience <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/start-a-newsletter/#figuring-out-the-tone-and-audience" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Our team is obsessed with figuring out the best way to communicate with everyone at Gusto, as we believe that the design system isn’t just for designers and engineers but for everyone in every department to get involved with. This means that we have to think about our audience and how designers can follow along with the more technical aspects of the work whilst engineers can understand and appreciate the design-led initiatives.</p>
<p>On this note, there’s a great piece by Linzi Berry, the Design Systems Lead at Lyft, where she writes about <a href="https://medium.com/tap-to-dismiss/art-of-diplomacy-2ad1e2cac795">design systems and empathy</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Systems design is not only scientific and meticulous, it’s the mastery of interacting with people in a sensitive and effective way. It takes human connection and empathy to go from a sticker sheet to a living, thriving system. The time we invest in relationships with designers and engineers (and their bosses, their bosses’ boss, their project managers, and the accessibility guru down the hall) is as important as building the system itself.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The only problem with this piece is that I wish Linzi had written it three years ago, as when I stared the team I believed that I could code or design my way out of any design systems problem. Alas! You must talk to people if you want to build a great system. You must reach out to everyone, designers and engineers alike, and help teach folks about the benefits of working within that system. The best way to start that little community? A newsletter.</p>
<p>Linzi continues with a one-two punch:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s important to remain positive when communicating with others because we are the physical embodiment of the system. If we are easy to work with, so is the system. If we are intimidating, so is the system.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>With this in mind the tone of each newsletter must be upbeat and jovial. It must bring everyone into the fold, with overwhelming kindness to be found in every sentence and every project we write about. In these newsletters we must try as hard as we can to also make design systems...fun.</p>
<h2 id="goals-of-the-newsletter" tabindex="-1">Goals of the newsletter <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/start-a-newsletter/#goals-of-the-newsletter" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>It’s important to think about what each edition of this newsletter should accomplish. If we’ve only worked on structural issues for the week then perhaps we can reach back into our archive of work and see if there’s something worth straight-up blogging about. But here are some of the high level goals we’re thinking about for each newsletter:</p>
<ol>
<li>Make sure our work is transparent for designers, engineers, product managers, and senior leadership.</li>
<li>Teach folks about the value of our work and how we can help solve complex UI issues across the organization.</li>
<li>Show before and after screenshots of big projects that we’ve tackled so people can see the scale and breadth of our work.</li>
<li>Discuss what projects we’ll be tackling in the near future and why it will be useful to the rest of the organization.</li>
<li>Create a common language for our components and our system.</li>
</ol>
<p>That last part is especially important as I’ve noticed how designers might start calling something a pattern, say “stickies” in the app to refer to one type of card component, when the component is actually called <code>Notifications</code> in the codebase. These small communication errors lead to big implementation issues and so our newsletter is the best place to build a friendly lexicon of terms and phrases that everyone in the company can share.</p>
<h2 id="what-should-we-publish" tabindex="-1">What should we publish? <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/start-a-newsletter/#what-should-we-publish" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>I think visual changes and component updates should lead the way, as they’re a lot more effective in garnering attention than the more infrastructure-led work that we do. In last month’s <em>spooky</em> newsletter we introduced things with our brand new <code>StepList</code> component that we built alongside another team in the company:</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<figure class="m-wrapper--unpadded">
<img class="chrome-shadow" alt="Our newsletter in Google Docs" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/newsletter-google-doc.png" loading="lazy" />
</figure>
</div>
<p>We record each entry in a Google doc so folks can scan through an archive of our work if they want to but we also send them a plaintext version via email. This way we have an archive if people want to go back through time, but we also don’t have to get folks to click a link if they want to read it. Anyway, this is a great way to foster partnerships and show how other teams might be able to collaborate with us and it’s a great opportunity to link to a Figma doc that breaks down all the different use cases of this component, or perhaps an audit instead. Actually this is one of the greatest benefits of using Figma on our design team at Gusto, as we can easily add links to mockups in our internal communications like this newsletter.</p>
<p>The list that we make in Notion goes a long way to helping us discuss what should and shouldn’t go into each edition. We want to make it as short and sweet as possible, and we want everyone to be able to see what we’re up to. By focusing on why we’re working on each project, and the impact after the fact, we can begin to spread the good word about our team.</p>
<p>After our first newsletter we had a ton of feedback from engineers, designers, and leaders at the company — and each appeared shocked as to just how much we could get done in such a small amount of time. It’s important to note that our output didn’t change at all, and we certainly weren’t more productive that month than any other. And I reckon that this shows just how important comms work is when it comes to design systems; you have to do the work, but you have to sell it, too.</p>
<h2 id="when-should-we-publish-them" tabindex="-1">When should we publish them? <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/start-a-newsletter/#when-should-we-publish-them" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Well, Mondays are often when everyone in the company is packed with meetings and 1-on-1s as everyone is trying to figure out the shape of their week. And Fridays are generally very quiet in the office as lots of folks work from home. So those two days are probably less likely for folks to read the email. This encouraged us to send the email on Wednesday afternoons to make sure that as many people have time to read it as possible.</p>
<p>Also, the cadence is important, too. If we publish these newsletters too frequently it might look like we’re not up to much, whereas if we publish them too infrequently (say, once a month) then folks will feel less included in the process of our work. Once every other week feels right for our team at the moment, but we’ll also be sharing updates about our work in person on a regular basis, too (such as Engineering and Product Design All-Hands meetings).</p>
<p>This feels like a lot of repetitive work and communication—but this outreach work is absolutely vital to the success of a good system, especially at the beginning when a team is just being formed. Maybe folks didn’t catch that Slack message about the new UI Kit! Maybe they didn’t see your new component in the library! Communication is extraordinarily complex at large companies with gigantic systems and the way to combat some of that is to be consistent (and maybe a bit loud) about your message.</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<figure class="m-wrapper--unpadded">
<img class="chrome-shadow" alt="Our UI Kit built in the Figma design tool" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/figma-ui-kit.png" loading="lazy" />
</figure>
</div>
<h2 id="wrapping-things-up" tabindex="-1">Wrapping things up <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/start-a-newsletter/#wrapping-things-up" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>With design systems work there is always more to be done and barely any time to sit back and see all the improvements that your team has made. So the other nice thing about the newsletter is that once the announcements are out there in public it all starts to feel a bit more complete. It’s wonderful to see folks noticing the work that ships and that is piece by piece making their lives easier and more efficient in the long run.</p>
<p>The newsletter is also a great place to talk about things that we could do better on our team. Perhaps we broke a component that wasn’t fixed immediately. Why was that? How do we avoid issues like this in the future? Creating an open forum and discussion around our thinking helps folks understand that we’re not just breaking things and being complete jerks. And this is important because any issues we cause in our design system that impacts other features risks damaging that trust we’ve built with everyone at Gusto — so we need to be extremely sensitive to anything that we change in our product.</p>
<p>Finally, I think it’s wonderful to have a record of everything we’ve built. It’s neat to see how that one project we started a month ago ties into this other project that we just wrapped up today. It boosts morale for the team and makes us all feel a little bit proud of the work we’ve been doing. Everything feels a bit more tangible after you hit send on that email. But these newsletters are also becoming a story that we can use to teach folks how we work—by making the smallest of changes each and every day—and nudging things forward by 1%. That’s what makes for a great design system. And that’s what we hope to accomplish with these emails.</p>
<p>Because if the revolution will not be televised, then it will almost certainly begin in a humble newsletter.</p>
Chip on your shoulder2019-10-26T11:32:47Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/chip-on-your-shoulder/<p>I’ve been reading <a href="https://www.chipswritinglessons.com/newsletter/">Chip Scanlan’s newsletter</a> for the past couple of weeks now and I adore it. With each issue he looks at the writing process, at what works for him and other popular writers, and then he digs into a few stories.</p>
<p>If you’re ever interested in becoming a better writer then this is certainly a very good place to start. One post that recently caught my attention was all about <a href="https://www.chipswritinglessons.com/2019/09/09/craft-lesson-how-to-tune-out-usuck-fm-and-free-yourself-to-write-2/">why we should lower our standards</a> when writing, and where Chip quotes William Stafford:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I believe that the so-called ‘writing block’ is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance. One should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing. It’s easy to write. You just shouldn’t have standards that inhibit you from writing.”</p>
<p>I’ve come to believe in Stafford’s counsel so much that I don’t just lower my standards. I abandon them. I allow myself to write as badly as I can.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>(This is why blogs are so very useful—they are a safe space to write terribly, to keep you focused on the keyboard and the act of typing, rather than the art of typing. My hot take is that if you consistently act, then the art will come sooner rather than later.)</p>
<p>Chip also writes about pacing and setting aside time to type like the wind. And this reminds me that the best thing I ever did for my own skills in this area was to write a weekly(ish) newsletter for the best part of three years. It forces me each Saturday to go to a cafe and think about storytelling and structure, punctuation and plot. Not many of them are good, but some of them are okay. And some of them are starting points for something else altogether:</p>
<p>Something great.</p>
The Dashboard Problem2019-10-19T10:06:57Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-dashboard-problem/<p>The longer I work on making large web apps, the more I get this feeling, a kind of sixth sense as I’m navigating an interface. It flickers on whenever I stare at a UI for long periods of time, and the more I pay attention to it the easier it is to see the shape of the organization that built it. Weird, huh?</p>
<p>I can begin to tell if the UI was made by one team, and if they’re an engineer-heavy organization. Or whether they have a bunch of junior designers without much UX experience. I can start to tell which parts of a company might own <em>this</em> feature or <em>that</em> one and that they don’t communicate properly with one another.</p>
<p>I can tell if they have a design systems team, too.</p>
<p>This sixth sense is most prevalent whenever I visit the dashboard of an app, the homepage. Because if there was one rule of product design it’s this: all dashboards are bad. Why? Well, for the most part no-one in a company owns the dashboard, the very first page the user sees, and perhaps the most important page of the app itself. No-one is responsible for it or understands how it should work. No-one can see how this section connects to all the others.</p>
<p>This is the most dangerous problem a product design team can face in my opinion: putting all these designers on <em>features</em> and <em>missions</em> without anyone thinking about the architecture or how it all fits together. And in this humble blogger’s opinion this is not simply design debt that accrues over time naturally, it is simply extremely poor management.</p>
<p>This is the Dashboard Problem made manifest.</p>
<p>Almost all of them have poor information hierarchy, with no clear path for people to do the one or two things that they frequently need to get done. Take GitHub, for instance. (And before I begin I just want to make it clear that I’m not dunking on any designers or engineers at GitHub, as making changes of this scale are almost impossible and I understand there are certainly folks there that want to change things. This is most likely not a problem of skill or talent, but of focus and mismanagement.)</p>
<p>So, here’s an example of my GitHub dashboard today:</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<figure class="m-wrapper--unpadded">
<img class="chrome-shadow" alt="A screenshot of my GitHub dashboard" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/github-redesign-before.jpg" loading="lazy" />
</figure>
</div>
<p>What is...any of this stuff? The whole dashboard feels like they wanted me to use GitHub as a social network. <code>All Activity</code>? Why on earth do I care about any of this? Is it information about a current project I’m working on? Nope. Is it information I need to know about in the future to do a better job? Nope!</p>
<p>What does everyone want to see on GitHub, instead? Well, here are the questions I ask myself every time I hit the dashboard:</p>
<ol>
<li>Which of my PRs are currently waiting for review? Which of these do I need to polish and fix?</li>
<li>Who needs me to review some code? How can I unblock someone?</li>
<li>What is my team working on currently? Is there something that they’re doing that will impact my work?</li>
</ol>
<p>Everything else is a nice to have, to be honest. Everything else besides these three points are non-essential and get in the way of me and my current project from being successful. Seeing a stream of random folks making pull requests and starring projects has absolutely no relevance to my day-to-day work. And that can get frustrating when I use the GitHub app hundreds of times a day. I imagine the millions of developers who use the software and have the same problems that I have. I want things to be easily understood, especially when you’re developing software for a giant company where a single command can break a billion dollar web app.</p>
<p>And I want fewer clicks, dammit.</p>
<p>After thinking about it for a while, I realized issues #1 and #2 above can be solved without big animations or fancy graphics. All we need is two lists: the first shows which projects you’re currently working on, and the second shows which folks are asking for code review. There’s nothing world changing about this design of course, but it immediately answers the questions I’m asking when I visit GitHub. And that’s because GitHub is not a social network: it is a tool for me to write code.</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<figure class="m-wrapper--unpadded">
<img class="chrome-shadow" alt="A screenshot of my GitHub dashboard redesign" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/github-redesign-after.jpg" loading="lazy" />
</figure>
</div>
<p>This design gives me an overview of my time and the work that’s coming up that I urgently need to finish. By heading to GitHub I can see everything I need to do without having to click anything. There’s less confusing information about stuff I don’t care about. And the status of each of these mini-projects are obvious from just a quick scan.</p>
<p>Now I can jump into a project and get to work.</p>
<p>My point here isn’t to argue that I’m a better designer than anyone. My point is that you can see mismanagement down at the UI level: when things don’t make sense it’s likely not because of a designer or an engineer and how they did an extremely poor job of things. Instead, it’s a form of company mismanagement and it drives me crazy because I realize that writing great code and doing good design is not enough. It’s useless in fact, when the organization of a company is actively hindering the work.</p>
<p>That’s when I want to burn everything to the ground.</p>
<p>Anyway, emotionally unhealthy drama aside, I reckon design leaders need to consider the Dashboard Problem earnestly and figure out how to build teams that don’t just focus on features or improving metrics. They must build teams to make great software first and foremost, and today they are failing.</p>
<p>And we, as users, are suffering for their mistakes.</p>
Quitting Analytics2019-10-18T21:16:44Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/quitting-analytics/<p>Garrett Dimon on <a href="https://garrettdimon.com/2019/quitting-analytics/">quitting Google analytics</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Some time ago, I removed all the tracking from my personal site, and I haven’t missed it. What started as a whimsical idea that was part performance-based, part referrer spam overload, and part backlash against Google evolved into a realization that analytics aren’t always all that important. Hits. Visits. Likes. Followers. These are easy to measure, but that didn’t make them important.</p>
<p>I’m more interested in the things I can’t easily quantify.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I only just stumbled upon Garrett’s blog this evening but I realize that I now need a rather long German word for when you discover a website and want to take the week off work and read every last bit of it.</p>
The Absurdity of the Nobel Prizes in Science2019-10-17T21:29:56Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/nobel-prize/<p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/10/the-absurdity-of-the-nobel-prizes-in-science/541863/">Ed Yong</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Defenders of the prize note that the Nobel committee is bound to the conditions laid out in Alfred Nobel’s will—the document that established the awards. But the will calls for the recognition of “the person”—singular—who has made the important discovery in their respective field “during the preceding year.” The Nobel committee, by contrast, recognizes up to three people, for work that could have been done decades prior. If they are already bending the original rules, why not go further? As the editors of Scientific American suggested in 2012, why not award the scientific prizes to teams and organizations, just like the Peace Prize can be?</p>
<p>The price of reform is low, and the cost of avoiding it is high.</p>
<p>[...] In some ways, the prizes are not about who has made the most important contributions, but who has best survived the hazardous labyrinth of academia.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I particularly like what Ed has to say about how the prize should be awarded to teams of people instead of the mythical genius archetype.</p>
Getting the easy stuff right2019-10-13T09:36:04Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/getting-the-easy-stuff-right/<p>I’ve been following Scott Galloway’s work for the last couple of days; reading his excellent blog posts about <a href="https://www.profgalloway.com/wewtf">the collective madness of WeWork</a> and how we should be <a href="https://www.profgalloway.com/mueller-night-invasions">kinder than our parents</a>, as well as watching his videos on how Amazon’s HQ2 was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3baKe4B3eyI">nothing short of a fiasco</a> or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqFnmhqReRM">why startups have bonkers mission statements</a> that make little to no sense whatsoever.</p>
<p>The majority of his work centers on startups and business, two subjects that don’t interest me in the slightest, but Scott makes the subject energetic and punk rock. Currently his books are eagerly waiting me to finish <em>Shoe Dog</em> by Phil Knight so that they can sink their teeth into me, grab me by the collar, and shake me senseless.</p>
<p>But the reason why I mention all this is because I haven’t been able to stop thinking about <a href="https://www.profgalloway.com/getting-the-easy-stuff-right">getting the easy stuff right</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’ve struggled my whole career with getting the easy stuff right. Rallying a team to pull together an insightful, hard-hitting presentation and then showing up to that presentation 15 minutes late and pissing everyone off. After the meeting, getting an email from the client about additional work or other opportunity, only to not respond in a timely fashion and lose momentum. Not following up with people when I should. In general, a lack of professionalism and bad manners have reduced the slope of my trajectory. Strange, as I know when I'm doing it, and know how to fix it … and I still don't.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’ve struggled with this an awful lot, too. Emails that go unanswered because of anxiety, or messages that I respond to far too late— I miss coffee with a friend or a job opportunity or a potential partner. In short, I find the easy things extraordinarily tough.</p>
<p>Scott looks at one example where he tried to help someone else on this front in a peculiar way. He was giving a lecture at NYU Stern and, an hour into it, a student walks in and sits down. But Scott dismisses him, tells him that he can’t just show up to a session late and expect to get the same treatment as the other students that really wanted to be there. An email exchange between the student and Scott takes place and the esteemed lecturer writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>xxxx, get your shit together.</p>
<p>Getting a good job, working long hours, keeping your skills relevant, navigating the politics of an organization, finding a work/life balance … these are all really hard, xxxx. In contrast, respecting institutions, having manners, demonstrating a level of humility … these are all (relatively) easy. Get the easy stuff right, xxxx. In and of themselves they will not make you successful. However, not possessing them will hold you back, and you will not achieve your potential, which, by virtue of you being admitted to Stern, you must have in spades. It's not too late, xxxx ...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I mention all this because there was a moment in college where I almost dropped out. And I feel that if a lecturer had said something like this to me I would’ve immediately snapped out of my ennui and confronted just how damn lucky I was to be there.</p>
<p>I must take more care of the easy things.</p>
Products and platforms2019-10-08T16:53:33Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/products-platforms/<p>The other evening I got to reading this old rant about and how <a href="https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611">most companies don’t understand platforms</a>, being far too focused on building short-sighted products instead of the underlying infrastructure that ties it all together. However, the writer of this post doesn’t make the distinction between ‘platforms and products’ entirely clear, I understood a platform to be APIs, data, and overall communication between teams and codebases whereas a ‘product’ is something that customers end up seeing. Like an app, for instance.</p>
<p>Stevey argues that Amazon is way better at building platforms than Google is:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses.</p>
<p>His Big Mandate went something along these lines:</p>
</blockquote>
<p>1. All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.</p>
<p>2. Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces.</p>
<p>3. There will be no other form of interprocess communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team's data store, no shared-memory model, no back-doors whatsoever. The only communication allowed is via service interface calls over the network.</p>
<p>4. It doesn't matter what technology they use. HTTP, Corba, Pubsub, custom protocols -- doesn't matter. Bezos doesn't care.</p>
<p>5. All service interfaces, without exception, must be designed from the ground up to be externalizable. That is to say, the team must plan and design to be able to expose the interface to developers in the outside world. No exceptions.</p>
<p>6. Anyone who doesn't do this will be fired.</p>
<p>7. Thank you; have a nice day!</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is all written nearly a decade ago now so it’s probably not the case today. But the reason why this post caught my attention is because I reckon this is something that relates to design systems somewhat: most folks think that design systems should be owned by a product team at a company but this is totally the wrong way to think about it in my opinion. Yes, a DS team is supporting multiple products — apps, websites, internal tools — but really they’re platform people. They should care first and foremost about the platform.</p>
<p>The platform in this example would be their component library, the styles, their guide, their design process feedback. Which is weird because I’m a product designer on a platform team and so the job description doesn’t make much sense to me. <em>Platform designer</em> sounds better.</p>
<p>Anyway, I loved this post a great deal and this distinction between platforms and products made something click in my head that I’ve been thinking about for a long time but have been unable to put into words.</p>
Take your broken heart and blog2019-10-07T01:30:06Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/take-your-broken-heart/<p>It’s an evening of clear skies, big hearts, and extremely good Internet. I’m listening to <a href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6V3hYPBCzmF1IsHRePRD8p?si=-hz8smAORcusz9tmiaRALQ">Cabin</a> and working on a project that is suspiciously shaped like a book. As I type, my good friend Trent Reznor is playing the piano in my apartment and soft clouds are rolling behind the tree that happens to be perched in front of my bedroom window.</p>
<p>The maybe-book? Well, it’s a list of every mistake I’ve made during the past three years of my work: <em>Systems, Mistakes, and the Sea</em>, or that’s the working title for now at least.</p>
<p>The book is not for anyone else. It’s entirely for me, it’s something to pour all my anger and vitriol into in the hope that something lovely might grow. The only time I’ve written something to be half proud of is when I’m pacing around my room, furious at something, or, in this case, someone.</p>
<hr />
<p>In college I didn’t measure projects in hours but in how many cups of tea they would require to complete. I would hurl myself into my work and I learned how to break an impossible and overwhelming project up into a million pieces. I discovered that everything could be accomplished if you sat in front of your computer for 14 hours straight.</p>
<p>I was so angry and alone. But the work was always there, waiting for me.</p>
<hr />
<p>The big tree outside my apartment is in the top three when it comes to San Francisco’s Loveliest And Most Beautiful Trees. There’s the orange blossom just a few blocks away in Noe Valley. And then there’s the tree with bright purple flowers outside Piccino, a quiet cafe in the Dogpatch. The purple is striking and fights for every fraction of attention with the blistering yellow of the building next to it. I imagine that the two are perfect for each other and yet they’re constantly fighting, locked in deadly combat forever.</p>
<p>I try to focus on the colors as I sit across the street in the tiny park, but I’m angry now. I crush my cup, hurl it into the trash, and hop on my bike. Motorcycles help with the anger, somehow. There’s a dance you must play, a song that starts the moment the key is in the ignition. All that anger is put on hold for a few moments whilst you listen to the roar of it.</p>
<hr />
<p>The truth is that I’m in love with someone who is inconsistently in love with me, if they’re in love with me at all. The pain and longing for her is so overwhelming, and our relationship so fractured and abusive, that I must throw myself into a project in order to completely avoid her.</p>
<p>Because I see her everywhere, and in all things; the menu of this cafe, where everything is in French; a stranger’s ponytail bouncing down the street and illuminated in the sunlight like a tree of gold leaf; a white background, a wall of pure white, like the dazzling brightness of her bedroom in the Mission; a woman jogging down the street and her sculpted muscles tightening on her back as if she could break a skull between her shoulder blades; a data scientist that sits next to me, the one with a howling, world-giving laugh.</p>
<p>I must work harder to forget. I must work harder to forgive myself. And I need more tea.</p>
<hr />
<p>For the last three months there has been a pattern to each day; wake up, remember her, get mad, go write, remember her again, go to the gym, go home, go write, and think of her one more time before sleep.</p>
<p>And now I’m typing this as if the typing will help.</p>
<hr />
<p>In every dimly lit bar between San Francisco and Los Angeles my friends have rolled their eyes as I describe the situation. And each time my friends say the same thing: run away and don’t ever look back. Block her. Throw your phone into the ocean. She’s toxic, abusive, radioactive. And you’re so much better than this.</p>
<p>But am I? I ask myself over and over again. Relentlessly.</p>
<p>Am I?</p>
<hr />
<p>As I leave the gym I immediately fantasize about returning tomorrow, what my work out will be, and how for a blissful sixty minutes there will be nothing but music and my body arguing with itself.</p>
<p>Every joint is screaming and each and every time it makes me smile.</p>
<hr />
<p>Whilst researching a project I come across a picture of Michelangelo’s David and for some reason find myself angry at him, remembering something that she had said about the statue. “Fuck you, buddy,” I think. “In a year I will look better than even you.”</p>
<p>It is midnight and I am arguing with a statue of a naked dude on the Internet.</p>
<hr />
<p>For some reason I’m thinking of what Carrie Fisher once said in an interview: “Take your broken heart, and turn it into art.” I suppose that the equivalent for me would be “take your broken heart, and turn it into a book about design systems.” Or better yet: “take your broken heart and blog.”</p>
<p>That’s not so catchy I guess. I’ll workshop it.</p>
<p>It certainly needs a lot more tea.</p>
Food and Sleep: II2019-09-29T21:20:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/food-sleep-ii/<p>I’ve been going to the gym every day for the past three months and I’m finally starting to enjoy myself. Although yes I’m still technically obese, and I’m taking pictures of my physical progress as I go this time, it’s not really about losing the weight. It’s not like the last time.</p>
<p>I’m trying to control my emotions instead; I’ve found that going to the gym is the only way to keep them in check. It’s the only way that I can hold things together and become a functioning member of society. I go after work, to a cute little place just a couple of blocks away, I crank up <a href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0LARGPJJ8rzjaMylvuJisc?si=_UUKqXsxQN2_xEgLfk5Q4Q">the playlist</a> as loud as I possibly can and then I try to focus on nothing else but the music for an hour and a half.</p>
<p>Afterwards all the stress and anxiety of my day evaporates and is replaced by aching bones and rebellious muscles that I had no idea existed. They revolt on my slow walk back to my apartment.</p>
<p>The last time I lost this much weight though was four years ago, where <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/food-and-sleep">I wrote about that feeling</a> of getting better, slowly, over time:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Months pass and I've forgotten the taste of chocolates, crisps and savory snacks. I learn how to cook. Slowly and with much bumbling, I learn how to cook. But each time I learn how to not make the same fuck-up.</p>
<p>And in the shadow of so many fuck-ups all I can do is hope that tomorrow will be a day of fewer fuck-ups. Perhaps one day I’ll forget the taste of a true and proper fuck-up, but until then I look into the mirror and I say to myself <em>you can do better than this.</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Four years have passed and I’m still learning how to avoid fucking this all up. It’s a lesson I have to constantly relearn if I’m not disciplined enough, if I’m not paying enough attention. But this time is bigger. It’s not about a nasty breakup, it’s not about embarrassment of the way I look or even about getting strong and fit again. That part is easy, honestly.</p>
<p>The hard part is being happy.</p>
<p>So I’ve bought myself a Watch to help on this front and for the past couple of days I’ve been using it to track myself, to keep myself focused on...myself. And it’s helping! I’ve been pushing my work outs, I’ve been paying more attention. I wonder how these metrics will help over time or whether they might hinder any progress. We’ll see.</p>
<p>For now I’m looking at my wrist, watching the dials fly and the colors blur around the circle — and I say to myself what I always say:</p>
<p><em>You can do better than this</em>.</p>
Source code2019-09-19T17:47:01Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/source-code/<p>I just finished listening to this episode of the Mystery Show that investigates <a href="https://gimletmedia.com/shows/mystery-show/o2hb96/case-5-source-code">how tall Jake Gyllenhaal is</a> and it’s outstanding. It’s a dumb mystery but one that I adored following.</p>
<p>Also I had no idea how funny Gyllenhaal is.</p>
Resistant to data2019-09-18T16:53:40Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/resistant-to-data/<p>The other day I was talking to Jules about the 99% Invisible episode she’d <a href="https://julesforrest.com/the-anthropocene-reviewed">written about</a>. In that post, Jules excitedly quotes the episode with Hank Green where he says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[...] there are all these phenomena in human life that are really resistant to language. I think physical pain is the one that’s perhaps most dramatically resistant to language.</p>
<p>But, for me, there’s also something about taste that’s resistant to language and one of the reasons we fight, I think, about Hawaiian pizza is because we almost cannot describe to each other how it tastes to us.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There are so many things that are resistant to language! And a couple of weeks ago I was in hospital, I had contracted appendicitis, and whilst I was in the ER I was asked how much pain I was in and <em>wow</em>. I found that I have no idea how to put my experience on a chart! My pain is...a...6 maybe? Is that too much? Is my 6 someone else’s 4?</p>
<p>This had me thinking about how design systems is resistant to data in a similar way; it’s almost impossible to measure the success or failure of a design system. It’s impossible to say that having seven modal components instead of one is a good idea and it’s impossible to say what effect four different illustration styles is having on your design and engineering team.</p>
<p>How much does your team need a UI Kit? Is that a 6 or a 7?</p>
<p>I reckon all efforts to measure the success of a design system will come up short and are more likely do <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/against-metrics-how-measuring-performance-by-numbers-backfires">harm by measuring them</a>. There is no-one that can tell you how bad things are, you just have to be close enough to the code and close enough to the design to feel things out.</p>
Imposter syndrome2019-09-13T09:33:30Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/imposter/<p>Rach Smith on why we should be more careful when we use the phrase <a href="https://rachsmith.com/2017/i-dont-have-imposter-syndrome/">‘imposter syndrome’</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When I see my wildly successful, senior developer peers talk publicly about how they deal with imposter syndrome I can see the intent behind it. They want to be approachable, relatable: “internet famous senior devs – they’re just like us!”. I agree that it is important to highlight the ways in which we are all the same because it drives the message home that any dev (given they have the time and access) could achieve the same level of success. I just really wish we could do this without labelling normal and healthy moments of self doubt with “imposter syndrome.”</p>
</blockquote>
Sick systems2019-09-11T19:33:30Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/sick-systems/<p>This post about the workplace and <a href="http://www.issendai.com/psychology/sick-systems.html">creating a sick system</a> is outstanding and I’ve been thinking about it all week. I can’t seem to find out anything about who wrote this but they argue that if you want to keep employees working for you forever there are a number of ways to do that, the most important being...</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Keep the crises rolling</strong>. Incompetence is a great way to do this: If the office system routinely works badly or the controlling partner routinely makes major mistakes, you're guaranteed ongoing crises. Poor money management works well, too. So does being in an industry where the clients are guaranteed to be volatile and flaky, or preferring friends who are themselves in perpetual crisis. You can also institutionalize regular crises: Workers in the Sea Org, the elite wing of Scientology, must exceed the previous week's production every single week or face serious penalties. Because this is impossible, it guarantees regular crises as the deadline approaches.</p>
<p>Regular crises perform two functions: They keep people too busy to think, and they provide intermittent reinforcement. After all, sometimes you win—and when you've mostly lost, a taste of success is addictive.</p>
<p>But why wouldn't people eventually realize that the crises are a permanent state of affairs? Because you've explained them away with an explanation that gives them hope.</p>
</blockquote>
Irony doesn’t scale2019-09-11T19:09:19Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/irony-doesnt-scale/<p>Paul Ford on <a href="https://postlight.com/trackchanges/irony-doesnt-scale">becoming a manager</a> at Postlight, the agency he cofounded:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is no true metric of success, not even profits. When I was a writer and a piece was published I could see the tweets, and sometimes the traffic metrics. I could see who emailed me. And then I’d chase the next success, often for months.</p>
<p>For a long time at Postlight, I kept looking around for signs like that. They never came. Eventually I realized that success is not about big hits. It’s actually in the opportunity to improve. How could our sales pipeline be better-managed? How could our team be coached on client interaction? Who seems frustrated, who could use coffee, who should be pinged on Slack? How could our meetings be more efficient, and in lesser quantities? Do we need more plants?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Paul continues:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[...] when the boss is self-deprecating it becomes someone’s job to lift him up. If I talk or chat on Slack about a bad day, I’m de-facto asking someone to soothe me. Some topics are fine: Kids being annoying, not getting enough sleep. But people need to mind their work, not me. The social contract is not, “tend to Paul.” If people do that—sick system.</p>
<p>I’m not a robot by any means. But I’ve learned to watch what I say. If there’s one rule that applies everywhere, it’s that Irony Doesn’t Scale. Jokes and asides can be taken out of context; witty complaints can be read as lack of enthusiasm. People are watching closely for clues to their future. Your dry little bon mot can be read as “He’s joking but maybe we are doomed!” You are always just one hilarious joke away from a sick system.</p>
</blockquote>
The Singularity Already Happened; We Got Corporations2019-09-09T11:33:33Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-singularity-already-happened/<p>Tim Maly compares the rampant and illogical fear of the emergence of AI with <a href="http://quietbabylon.com/tim-maly/">the real threat of corporations</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What if the private pursuit of profit was—for a long time—proximate to improving the lot of humans but not identical to it? What if capitalism has gone feral, and started making moves that are obviously insane, but also inevitable?</p>
</blockquote>
The Box2019-08-31T20:10:22Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-box/<p>There’s a wonderful quote by Aza Raskin, although I’ve forgotten where he said it now, but I think it about all the time. He argued that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Design is not about learning to think outside the box, it’s about finding the right box to think inside of.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And when it comes to design systems I think that’s exactly what’s so tough about it. Not only do you have to learn when and how to draw the box to think inside of, but you have to get everyone else in an organization to think inside of that box, too.</p>
Sticks and Ropes2019-08-31T14:49:31Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/sticks-and-ropes/<p>I love this piece by Dave Rupert on videogames and <a href="https://daverupert.com/2019/08/sticks-and-ropes/">the art of kindness</a>. He quotes <a href="https://www.ign.com/articles/2016/06/15/e3-2016-more-cryptic-death-stranding-details-from-kojima">a recent interview</a> by Hideo Kojima:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Most of your tools in action games are sticks. You punch or you shoot or you kick. The communication is always through these sticks, I want people to be connected not through sticks, but through what would be the equivalent of ropes</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dave then continues:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Most games are about fighting off bad guys. Creating divisions and putting distance between yourself and bad things. “Bad things” in video games usually mean objectives and outcomes that don’t explicitly benefit your avatar. I don’t think I’ve realized how much video games reinforce self-centeredness and self-preservation. It’s your story, you’re the hero, attack whatever isn’t on your team and gets in your way.</p>
<p>I’ve started thinking about sticks and ropes a lot in regards my online interactions. Regretfully, I see places where I’ve acted more like a stick when a rope was the better tool for the job. I am not perfect at this, but I’ve been working on tempering some of my reactions and criticisms before becoming a stick.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’ve been thinking about this post for the past couple of days now, especially as I begin work on a maybe-book project—it’s a book/zine/talk/I-don’t-know-what-yet that lists every mistake I’ve made in the field of design systems. And as I read Dave’s piece I realized the title of this book that I’m writing should probably be something like <em>How I learned to stop being a stick: a Robin Rendle story.</em></p>
Owning the Archive2019-08-31T14:22:51Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/adventures-archive/<p>I’ve been writing a semi-weekly newsletter called Adventures in Typography for a couple of years now and it has always bothered me that I didn’t own the archive of all that writing. I don’t like the idea that I’m dependent on anyone else, or a third party service—especially when there’s a few pieces I’ve written that I look back on quite fondly.</p>
<p>And so the other day I spent some time making a permanent space for the newsletter. You can now <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/adventures/">visit the archive</a>! You can read <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/adventures/the-san-francisco-map-fair">things about maps</a>! Or about the <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/adventures/the-four-kinds-of-space">four kinds of typographic space</a>! Or a disastrous two week trip to <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/adventures/the-berlin-handshake">Berlin</a>! It’s a collection of basically every typographic thought I’ve had since I moved to San Francisco.</p>
<p>To make things easier on myself I probably should’ve done this by hitting <a href="https://api.buttondown.email/v1/schema#">the Buttondown API</a>, requesting that data every week via <a href="https://www.netlify.com/docs/functions/">a Netlify function</a> and then transforming all that Markdown with <a href="https://www.11ty.io/">Eleventy</a>. But for now I’m doing it all manually by downloading a zip from Buttondown itself, which is fine for now.</p>
<p>Anyway! This is mostly for my own entertainment and anxiety and I’ll be sure to polish things as time passes. It could all do with some design attention for sure.</p>
Baseline2019-08-18T20:06:46Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/baseline/<p>We have to start looking at performance and accessibility as being the baseline of web development work, instead of nice to have features that we can tack onto a project later. So I ranted my heart out the other day for CSS-Tricks and <a href="https://css-tricks.com/accessibility-and-web-performance-are-not-features-theyre-the-baseline/">I wrote</a> that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I think it’s important to make note of Deb Chachra’s argument that “any sufficiently advanced negligence is indistinguishable from malice.” With that in mind, it’s not just bad software design and development if a website is slow. Performance and accessibility aren’t features that can linger at the bottom of a Jira board to be considered later when it’s convenient.</p>
<p>Instead we must start to see inaccessible and slow websites for what they are: a form of cruelty. And if we want to build a web that is truly a World Wide Web, a place for all and everyone, a web that is accessible and fast for as many people as possible, and one that will outlive us all, then first we must make our websites something else altogether; we must make them kind.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I riff on some points that <a href="https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/amphora/">Ethan Marcotte</a> and <a href="https://craigmod.com/essays/fast_software/">Craig Mod</a> have consistently been making and bring them full circle to <a href="https://www.cennydd.com/">Cennydd Bowles</a> and what he’s been talking about for a couple of years now when it comes to ethics and software; fast and accessible websites are not only ‘good’ in the sense of quality and craftsmanship, but also in terms of being a good person and caring for other people.</p>
<p>If we’re making slow and inaccessible websites then it’s hard to make the case that we’re doing a good job and that we’re being kind and thoughtful, too.</p>
What do you wish you had known about engineering before getting started?2019-08-03T09:57:27Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/engineering-getting-started/<p>Someone asked a group of engineers in our Slack channel this question the other day and I spent a whole bunch of time thinking about it. What do I wish I had known about engineering before I had started? What would have helped me the most? What’s been the biggest mistake I’ve made so far?</p>
<p>Well, I wish I had known that the genius engineer is simply a myth and I wish I had known that working alone is almost a complete waste of time.</p>
A Vacuum of Courage2019-07-27T11:55:39Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/a-vacuum-of-courage/<p>I’ve been a big fan of Matthew Ström’s blog lately and his latest piece on <a href="https://matthewstrom.com/writing/distributed-decision-making/">the management strategy that saved Apollo 11</a> is likewise excellent. Matthew writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In today’s companies, decisions are made at the highest level; by the board, the c-suite, senior vice presidents, etc. Leaders with great decision-making abilities are sought after. Entire classes at the most selective business schools are taught on how to make decisions.</p>
<p>But in 1969, the people in charge of Apollo 11 trusted a 23-year-old engineer in a back room of mission control to make one of the most consequential decisions of this decade-defining mission. And they did so in seconds, without deliberating or debating.</p>
<p>Next time you’re faced with a decision, ask yourself: how can this decision be made on the lowest level? Have you given your team the authority to decide? If you haven’t, why not? If they’re not able to make good decisions, you’ve missed an opportunity to be a leader. Empower, enable, and entrust them. Take it from NASA: the ability to delegate quickly and decisively was the key to landing men on the moon.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I was talking with someone a rather long time ago about the organization we worked at at the time and he mentioned that there was “a vacuum of courage” – everyone was terrified to make decisions and so no-one was given the respect or authority to act swiftly on a problem. Every decision had to be punted to the level above them, almost like a Communist regime where clueless politburo yes men have no experience of the field over which they manage. Their inexperience led to delays in decision making and lies pumping throughout the company like a cancer, even though there were dozens of people beneath them that could quickly make a decision to fix the issue at hand.</p>
<p>This is not how I like to work and it’s certainly not what good management is. It’s clear to me now that delegating decisions, and making them at the lowest possible level as Matthew writes above, is how you build a great organization.</p>
To Move Without Latency2019-07-24T18:18:39Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/to-move-wihtout-latency/<p>Craig Mod has some pretty interesting thoughts on <a href="https://craigmod.com/essays/fast_software/">why software should be lightning fast</a>. One example he makes is this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sublime Text has — in my experience — only gotten faster. I love software that does this: Software that unbloats over time. This should be the goal of all software. The longer it’s around, the more elegant it should become. Smooth over like a river stone. I have full trust in the engineering of Sublime Text because I’ve used it for over a decade, but also because it always feels like a fast, focused tool (even though it’s actually very complicated) and has only become faster the longer I’ve used it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Last week I switched from Atom to VS Code and I immediately felt the same way that Craig does about Sublime. VS Code is <em>lightning</em> fast – you can search for a string in a million line codebase in a flash.</p>
<p>But there’s something else that’s special about VS Code, too: whereas other programming tools treat programming as any other kind of text, I feel like the designers of VS Code get that code isn’t text. They see that code can have this interconnectedness – one example of this might be a React component that has a ton of other React components within it. In a flash you can cmd+click into that sub-component and keep moving.</p>
<p>And I know that VS Code probably wasn’t the first to do that but the culmination of its extensive feature set and its extensions is nothing short of wonderful.</p>
<p>But to be honest I would trade all of these nifty features for sheer speed. I don’t care about functionality anywhere near as much as being able to do common tasks easily and quickly, or as Mod calls it “to move without latency.” That’s all I want when I’m using software – whether that’s a website or a giant complicated macOS application – I want to move without latency.</p>
<p>I remember a couple of years ago my brother showing me Drive Club, a video game on PS4, and how it boots <em>instantly</em>. You can go from popping in the disk to jumping into a race in a matter of seconds. I gasped the first time I saw this because I thought he was showing me a video. And I have a very strong feeling that the next generation of video games consoles won’t be about better graphics but pure, raw speed. No load screens. No waiting around for some dumb gif to spin endlessly. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1qnIBLNOG0">Just game. Good, game.</a></p>
<p>I want all this for websites too because it’s clear to me after all this time working on them that bad performance is not a bug and speed isn’t an additional feature you can slop on top of something.</p>
<p>If an interface is not fast then it is not good.</p>
The Success of Many Days2019-07-24T11:26:59Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-success-of-many-days%202/<p>Not only is today my birthday but it also marks <a href="https://gusto.com/company-news/gusto-brand-refresh">the launch of the Gusto brand refresh</a>: we’ve shipped a new website and we’ve redesigned the Gusto web app experience that lets hundreds of thousands of companies run payroll each month.</p>
<p>I reckon all this work has led to something...<em>outstanding</em>. Screenshots of the UI don’t really do the work justice though as it’s only when you open up the app and use it that you’ll feel things are significantly faster and much easier to read. And in complete earnestness I think this is the best project I’ve ever worked on.</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<figure class="m-wrapper--unpadded">
<img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/gusto-new-brand-dashboard.png" alt="The new dashboard for the Gusto app" />
</figure>
</div>
<p>I didn’t play a role in the design of the brand itself (so the logo, the illustrations, the typographic choices like which typefaces we use now) and so I can only compliment our wonderful Brand Studio team for all those decisions. My work was instead focused on the design system of the project where our team refactored hundreds of components and thousands of pages in our web application to ensure that we have an accessible, consistent, and easy to read interface. And to say that it was a lot of work is an understatement to say the least.</p>
<p>Over the coming months I’ll start to write up my thoughts about what I learned along the way (I think maybe I have an idea for a Big Printed Thing) but the funny thing about this rebrand is that although it started a year ago I was really the first person to focus on it. And that’s because as soon as I joined Gusto I dove into refactoring our enormous and overwhelming front-end codebase, removing old components, and cleaning things up – all in service of a day like today. Because you can’t have a good web app or a consistent brand experience without a consistent front-end codebase.</p>
<p>When you’re writing CSS or designing React components you have to ask yourself the most important question of them all: <em>What if...?</em></p>
<p>What if we changed our fonts tomorrow? What if we changed all our colors? What if we added themes? What if we changed our logo? What if we wanted better checkboxes, radios, buttons? What if we wanted more white space, better hierarchy? What if we wanted this link to look like a button but act like a link? What if we’re horribly, horribly wrong about all this?</p>
<p>It’s questions like these have led me to be obsessed with refactoring and so although this looks like a three month project, it’s really been three whole years of my life.</p>
<p>This isn’t to say that I was the only person working on this, or the only person that should get credit. Brad Azevedo has been a mentor and co-conspirator of mine for the past couple of months and we’ve been <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/partners-in-crime">working together like detectives</a>. If it it wasn’t for him joining the Design Systems team this project wouldn’t have been even remotely possible.</p>
<p>Anyway, we’re proud of the work we’ve shipped today but it’s important to note that this is only the beginning. There are lots of areas of our product that frustrate and concern us, where we both feel that we fall significantly short of providing the best user experience possible. Our Design System and front-end is nowhere near perfect and we have a number of enormous refactoring projects on the horizon soon.</p>
<p>To get us through this immense project, and to help boost our morale when we became particularly frustrated with something, we would constantly remind ourselves that all we had to do today was make the UI <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/1percent-better">1% better</a>.</p>
<p>Back in March when this project was heating up I wrote that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Here’s an opinion without any facts or evidence: I only care about making the design system 1% better every day. If that means deleting a bit of code that doesn’t have any impact whatsoever then that’s okay. If it means changing the font weight of this one component to be slightly more legible then that’s okay too. So long as every day there’s an improvement of some kind.</p>
<p>You might argue that all these 1% changes are distractions from much larger projects that might have an enormous impact.</p>
<p>My argument would be that those massive, revolutionary projects will never happen. Instead it’s best to slowly move towards where we want to, step by step, so that we gather momentum over time.</p>
<p>1% today is better than 50% tomorrow or some distant and impossible far-flung future.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We’ve found this mantra to be helpful as design systems work can be so impossibly stressful and difficult to scope. Everything can be on fire at the same time but you’re only one person – you can’t fix every issue today. And I guess what this means is that today I’m more convinced than ever that our approach is the right way to deal with design systems work – not having great big plans for a utopian vision of the world but instead focusing on tiny improvements every single day.</p>
<p>Because all those tiny things add up to something beautiful, as the new redesigned Gusto experience shows. And thanks to all those improvements of 1%, today is not a day of success, but <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/tigerman">the success of many days</a>.</p>
That Feeling of Rebellion2019-07-21T10:52:51Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/rebellion/<p>The first question I ask myself whenever anyone assigns me a project is this: <em>what is the real project though</em>?</p>
<p>For some completely idiotic reason I can never seem to work on a project unless I feel like I’m doing something punk and unexpected. Project X might have a rigorous deadline and a clear set of steps to complete but I’ve always found that there’s always a secret project lurking within it that no-one’s seemed to notice. It might be refactoring a ton of CSS in the process or obliterating our icons or documenting the design in Figma for our designers. Or building some new tool that we need. Or advocating for a new hire.</p>
<p>Writing is the same way too. If I don’t feel like this is something I <em>shouldn’t</em> be writing then I can’t. And I wish I could! I think it would be better for my career and my bank account if I could just simply do whatever anyone tells me to do.</p>
<p>And I’m not saying this to brag about how rebellious and brilliant I might be, I’m saying this to moan about how childish this all is.</p>
<hr />
<p>We were at my tutors cottage huddled in a small room and sat at a round table when I recognized this feeling for the first time in college. Each student was asked what their dissertation was going to be and I found myself growing increasingly upset and bored by the conversation. Neat, this person is writing about feminism in the <em>Yellow Wallpaper</em> huh? Oh! That person fancies discussing Nature vs. Nurture and modernist post-cultural whatever the fucks in <em>The Tempest</em>? How brave!</p>
<p>It feels like everyone has already done this a billion times before; just outside there are a thousand students in a place like us sat at a round table and having precisely the same conversation. Why are we writing about the same gosh darn things as everyone else? And why is my tutor not pushing us to do something extraordinary?</p>
<p>Why are we okay with repeating what someone else has written, but with the words ever so slightly rearranged?</p>
<p>I wanted us all to be courageous and bold and at least a little daring. And so when it came my turn to talk about my dissertation I proposed something entirely preposterous: I wanted to write a 10,000 word epic poem about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Bly">Nellie Bly</a>. I had somehow stumbled upon a story some weeks prior as to how she snuck into an asylum on Blackwell island in 1887 to reveal the awful conditions in which the inmates were being treated. Except I wanted to move the location to Bedlam asylum in London. And I wanted to write about each of the inmates and experiment with a different style of poetry. The director of the asylum could be this bombastic <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screamer_(march)">screamer</a> and he could sing about madness and physical abuse whilst being entirely bonkers himself.</p>
<p>After I finished talking everyone in the room looked at me as if I was unhinged and this made me determined that this was precisely what I had to write. I knew I would rather fail at doing something disastrously bold than excel at something average and commonplace.</p>
<p>Oh and the dissertation? The ashes are currently sealed in a salt mine three thousand feet beneath an unidentified bog in the south west of England.</p>
<hr />
<p>My dissertation was an enormous, ambitious and entirely foolish disaster that led to an awful grade. But! It made me sort of realize that the work I want to do is always going to make me an outlier to some degree – that’s the work I’m comfortable doing; the work that no-one sees or really gives a damn about. Because that’s the most exciting thing: to do the thing I shouldn’t be doing.</p>
<p>And so what this means is that I can never walk into a room and agree with someone. I can never shake someone’s hand and smile and go away and do the big dumb project. I have to die on every fucking hill I see and I have to use every project as an excuse to write an unexpected 10,000 word goddamn poem.</p>
<p>My point with all this is that I am not a Yes Man, but I wish I was.</p>
Confidence and Berry Glen2019-07-13T11:23:11Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/confidence/<p>I’m hurtling through Northern California up to Oregon. I want to see if I can travel alone out here and I have everything I need; a backpack, a motorcycle, a couple of t-shirts, a book. But do I have the confidence to charm my way through this place? Do I have what it takes to navigate and solve problems on the road? How long can I last out here on my own with no backup, no friends along for the ride? Can I stand the desolation of this place, too?</p>
<p>A landscape where you can drive for hours on end without seeing anyone at all.</p>
<p><em>Downshift, drift, knee down, through the corner, upshift.</em></p>
<p>I’ve been doing this for hours now – riding through canyons and countless forests that reach out far beyond the horizon. There’s a pattern to it all that I find meditative but to absolve myself of the loneliness I’m listening to a podcast as I swoop through the valleys and small towns that dot the state with names like <em>False Klamath</em>, <em>Rockefeller Forest</em>, <em>Berry Glen</em>, <em>Surgone</em>, <em>Crescent City</em>.</p>
<p>I can’t stop smiling.</p>
<p>I also can’t stop listening to an episode of <a href="http://www.merlinmann.com/roderick/">Roderick on the Line</a> as two giant bears – statues perched on the edge of a cliff next to a bridge – welcome me into their village. John begins talking about how his nine year old daughter has been having a tough time of things lately; she’s struggling with homework and with school as everything in her life is becoming more complex. People now expect things of her and she is constantly disappointing everyone.</p>
<p>Merlin doesn’t chime in with a joke as usual but instead leans into the microphone and listens, waiting for the story. How is John trying to solve his daughter’s problem? Well, that’s the thing John says. You can’t.</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<figure class="m-wrapper--unpadded">
<img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/bike-portland.jpg" />
</figure>
</div>
<p>I suddenly find myself in a giant canyon with all the light and heat of a hundred suns bearing down on me. I find myself leaning away from these canyons roads and into John’s story as I drive. The way he talks so effortlessly – and in the perfect measure and rhythm – is how I hope to one day write.</p>
<p>But John can’t solve his daughter’s problems at all. He can no longer fix everything in her life and he sees that this is the first step in her becoming an adult – her life is more complex and sprawling than a child’s now. John appreciates that she’s a person with her own feelings and hopes. She has a web of connections with other people that he can no longer see or even fully understand. All he can do to help is listen. And nod his head. And listen some more.</p>
<p><em>Downshift, drift, knee down, through the corner, upshift.</em></p>
<p>I start sniffling, then crying a little bit (I’m crying my guts out) and as I listen to all this I accelerate through that canyon road.</p>
<p>A swarm of bikers on Harley Davidson’s suddenly appear in the distance coming towards me. They all start waving and hollering — thrilled to see someone else enjoying being alone with a motorcycle. They’re wearing leather everything — chains droop from their pockets, bullet proof vests hug them tightly — they’re hairy, hulking, enormous lads and every single one of them are cheering me on.</p>
<p>I hesitantly wave back, pretending to be that Big Biker Boy but under my helmet I’m still crying ferociously. Although now I feel overwhelmed with laughter as this is quite possibly the least tough thing in the world and I’m being cheered on by a bunch of vagabonds and nasty boys.</p>
<p>I cry and laugh through that entire stretch of canyon highway whilst I keep telling myself: <em>downshift, drift, knee down, through the corner, upshift.</em></p>
Vulf Sans2019-07-12T08:31:01Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/vulf-sans/<p>Not only is <a href="https://ohnotype.co/fonts/vulf-sans">Vulf Sans</a> by OhNo Type Co a wonderful contribution to my growing list of typefaces that I need to use in a project soon, it also has perhaps <a href="https://twitter.com/OHnoTypeCo/status/1149676598037102595">the best ad</a> from any type foundry I’ve ever seen.</p>
<p>Originally designed for Jack Stratton’s band Vulfpeck, Vulf Sans has now grown into an expansive family with a ton of charm and lots of little quirks (the italics <em>especially</em>). And this new ad with Jack walking down the street talking about why Vulf Sans exists is as funny and charming and lovely as the new type family itself.</p>
<p>Why is this video so charming that it’s encouraged me to <em>blog</em> though? Well, I think because it’s made me realize that typography doesn’t have to be so uptight and serious. You don’t need to sell fonts to fancy designers with a big parallax website – you can make a quirky video on the street and sell fonts to their friends and parents instead.</p>
<p>And that’s kinda liberating, to me at least.</p>
Partners in Crime2019-06-29T14:51:06Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/partners-in-crime/<p>In videogame design there’s the concept of ‘the loop’ – a pattern that a game has been designed around. You shoot, you drive, you jump. There’s a finite number of things you can do in a world, and the real videogame design magic is the order in which you let a player experiment with those mechanics. A game isn’t a good one if it has jumping, shooting, or driving, but instead it’s good if the order of those actions makes sense and is constantly surprising.</p>
<p>Or so the theory goes.</p>
<p>But when it comes to software development there’s a different kind of loop and it (mostly) works like this: an engineer will sit in a team of a dozen or so people, and after they’ve typed with their headphones on silently for a couple of hours alone, they’ll send someone a tiny bit of code to review once they’ve finished. They’ll wait for automated tests to pass, they’ll maybe have another round of reviews and then once everything checks out, their code will be published.</p>
<p>And after working on an engineering team for the last 3 years I’ve come to the conclusion that we got this all wrong. Well, the structure and organization of software development anyway. Here’s why:</p>
<ul>
<li>There is always a delay between when an engineer has finished typing and when that code has finally been reviewed. There will often be things they need to fix; there will be tests that have to pass a series of automated checks and after they’ve finished typing there’s possibility for more errors to be added or for context to be lost as time passes. It’s easy to forget why you did something earlier in the day, let alone last Tuesday.</li>
<li>A lot of refactoring work doesn’t make sense without written context – often you have to write something nasty that is part of a bigger project or refactor. Qualifications can be made in comments, sure, but these aren’t always clear. Talking about these issues in person always makes much more sense.</li>
<li>There is often a million ways to make a thing work and one engineer can hardly be expected to think through each of them before they start. Often these improvements and suggestions will come in the code review stage, hours after the suggestion would have been most useful and saved a decent amount of time. I reckon millions of dollars are set ablaze like this at big companies.</li>
<li>When working alone, information is siloed in the mind of one person, that lone engineer, and when they leave the company they take all of that information and context with them; each employee that leaves your company isn’t just a collection of programming skills but they’re also an archive of a vast and complex system. To recoup the loss of information like that takes <em>years</em> of training.</li>
</ul>
<p>It’s clear to me that software shouldn’t be built or designed like this. A lone genius isn’t the right way to think about an engineer and it appears to me that working alone is the worst possible way to build complex applications.</p>
<p>So how do we structure a team instead? How should we think about the relationship between engineers?</p>
<p>Well, I think we should take inspiration from, of all places, detectives. Each engineer should be seen as one half of an investigative unit; on the first day on the job they should should be assigned a partner in crime that they sit next to everyday and work on the same problems together. And my experience here is perhaps a bit limited but every moment of intense productivity I’ve experienced is when I’m paired with someone and our skills overlap slightly but we’re at opposing ends of a spectrum.</p>
<p>That’s when things really fly.</p>
<p>And the more I think about this way of seeing an engineer – not as an individual, but as one of a pair – the more I believe this should be how eng teams are organized. There’s so many reasons why this works better! And lately this happened to me – I’ve paired with an engineer everyday for the last three months and I’ve noticed so many improvements over the lone wolf model:</p>
<ul>
<li>Together we can make sweeping changes very quickly.</li>
<li>We don’t need to wait for code to be reviewed because we’re constantly looking at each other’s work.</li>
<li>Suggestions for improvements can be given at the earliest stages before work has really begun.</li>
<li>There is so much more context that can be given in person and learning about a complex system takes half the time.</li>
<li>There’s no need for standup because we’re working on the same thing everyday.</li>
<li>Because we work in pairs there’s less siloed information and if one of us leaves for whatever reason then the other person can hold the ship together.</li>
</ul>
<p>So today we’ve built our engineering teams around missions or features or pods – giant clumps of engineers that sit next to each other everyday but work almost entirely in isolation – and I think that makes things easy for management and org structures but it makes things so much harder for capable engineers to get good work done.</p>
<p>I think we’ve built these teams in service of managers and not what the work requires of us.</p>
A Vacancy Has Been Detected2019-06-20T20:21:32Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/vacancy-detected/<p>Kelly Sutton has written a heartbreaking piece about <a href="https://kellysutton.com/2019/06/19/a-vacancy-has-been-detected.html">empathy in software design</a> that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about for the past couple of days:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There might be no reason to build the concept of “grief” into a dorm room assignment system. It likely wasn’t financially viable. It definitely was an edge case.</p>
<p>This is also a story of cosmic indifference. There are an intractable number of situations that a poor dorm room system might be subject to. The death of a student is just one.</p>
</blockquote>
Census Stories2019-06-16T21:22:44Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/census-stories/<p>In his most recent newsletter, <a href="https://www.robinsloan.com/">Robin</a> turned me onto a fascinating blog called <em>Census Stories</em> by the historian Dan Bouk and he recounts tales of how past censuses were made. This particular <a href="http://censusstories.us/2018/10/29/Alaska-paths.html">account of Agnes Parrott though</a>, who happened to work on the census that took place in Alaska in 1940, shook me thoroughly awake this morning.</p>
<p>After finding a letter from Agnes, written almost 80 years ago (and sent to her boss via steamboat), Dan describes what it took to rummage through those archives:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Online search is not your best friend as you begin your hunt for useful documents. That’s not to say the National Archives Catalog is useless. But it won’t get you to Agnes Parrott. Instead, you’re better off heading straight to the Guide to Federal Records and its entry for Record Group 29 “Records of the Bureau of the Census.” There you can find an overview of the collections and a vague sense of what might be available. It will show you, for instance, that the archives have a lot of administrative records from the early twentieth century censuses. This will give you hope. But if you search within the guide for “Alaska” you will find only two entries. This will sap your hope.</p>
<p>But do not let it. To find Agnes Parrott in Angoon, Alaska you have to trek to the archives in person!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>After reading Dan’s <em>Census Stories</em> over the past couple of days I recognize this is how I aspire to write; detailed, optimistic, big-hearted, hard working. It’s what I meant the other day when I wrote about <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/the-careful-work">the careful work</a>. Perhaps the best example of this however is when Dan writes about technology and <a href="https://censusstories.us/2018/08/11/foudray.html">how women did much of the census work</a> whilst being underpaid and mostly ignored in favor of technology:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the archives, one can readily see women working for the Census. In a very limited way…</p>
<p>Consider this photograph from 1939 or 1940:</p>
</blockquote>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/census-stories.jpg" alt="Census Stories" /></p>
<blockquote>
<p>When I look at this picture, my eyes fly first to a person’s face, to a ruffled collar, to meticulously styled hair. Then I notice the papers she’s grasping—a thick stack, marked up all over. Finally, I notice a small mechanical device. In sum, I see a census clerk preparing paper punch cards—like the one she’s grabbing with her right hand. I see a working woman in a knowledge factory, one body in the human treadmill that transforms enumerators’ completed schedules into bound volumes of printed statistics.</p>
</blockquote>
Every Layout2019-06-15T23:26:48Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/every-layout/<p>Andy Bell and Heydon Pickering’s new project, <a href="https://every-layout.dev/">Every Layout</a>, is fascinating as it hopes to document some common layout problems and describe how to build them with CSS. But there’s a post in the depths of the site called <a href="https://every-layout.dev/blog/algorithmic-design/">Algorithmic Design</a> that I found pretty interesting, too:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We make many of our biggest mistakes as visual designers for the web by insisting on hard coding designs. We break browsers’ layout algorithms by applying fixed positions and dimensions to our content.</p>
<p>Instead, we should be deferential to the underlying algorithms that power CSS, and we should think in terms of algorithms as we extrapolate layouts based on these foundations. We need to be leveraging selector logic, harnessing flow and wrapping behavior, and using calculations to adapt layout to context.</p>
<p>The tools for flexible, robust, and efficient web layout are there. We are just too busy churning out CSS to use them.</p>
</blockquote>
The New Wilderness2019-06-14T00:02:12Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/new-wilderness/<p>Maciej Cegłowski on <a href="http://idlewords.com/2019/06/the_new_wilderness.htm">why the surveillance economy should be dismantled by the government</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the eyes of regulators, privacy still means what it did in the eighteenth century—protecting specific categories of personal data, or communications between individuals, from unauthorized disclosure. Third parties that are given access to our personal data have a duty to protect it, and to the extent that they discharge this duty, they are respecting our privacy.</p>
<p>Seen in this light, the giant tech companies can make a credible claim to be the defenders of privacy, just like a dragon can truthfully boast that it is good at protecting its hoard of gold. Nobody spends more money securing user data, or does it more effectively, than Facebook and Google.</p>
<p>The question we need to ask is not whether our data is safe, but why there is suddenly so much of it that needs protecting. The problem with the dragon, after all, is not its stockpile stewardship, but its appetite.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Woof.</p>
Nobody really owns product work2019-06-13T20:35:40Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/nobody-owns-product/<p>I love this piece by Jonas Downey where he writes for <a href="https://m.signalvnoise.com/nobody-really-owns-product-work">Signal V. Noise</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Somewhere along the line I realized and accepted the truth: nobody really owns anything in a product made by a team.</p>
<p>Whatever ownership you have over an individual contribution is immediately forfeited the moment you commit the code. At that moment, the work becomes part of the ever-evolving organism that comprises a software system.</p>
<p>Each piece of work is a mere pebble tossed into a flowing river. Maybe your pebble will become bedrock—sticking around for a long time and altering the water’s trajectory. Or, maybe it’ll quickly dissolve into dust when new pebbles come along and crash into it. Both of those outcomes are completely natural and worthy of celebration.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When you work in a big company you have to get used to this feeling of your work being obliterated and replaced by something better than what you built before. And being okay with that is a staple of seniority and experience.</p>
The Rise and Demise of RSS2019-06-10T02:13:12Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/rise-and-demise-of-rss/<p>Sinclair Target on <a href="https://twobithistory.org/2018/09/16/the-rise-and-demise-of-rss.html">what RSS is and where it went</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...two decades later, RSS appears to be a dying technology, now used chiefly by podcasters and programmers with tech blogs. Moreover, among that latter group, RSS is perhaps used as much for its political symbolism as its actual utility. Though of course some people really do have RSS readers, stubbornly adding an RSS feed to your blog, even in 2018, is a reactionary statement. That little tangerine bubble has become a wistful symbol of defiance against a centralized web increasingly controlled by a handful of corporations, a web that hardly resembles the syndicated web of Werbach’s imagining.</p>
<p>The future once looked so bright for RSS. What happened? Was its downfall inevitable, or was it precipitated by the bitter infighting that thwarted the development of a single RSS standard?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I love how the concept of RSS was being worked on by a bunch of different people at once. Although it’s still a damn shame that the community around it is dwindling, I wrote about <a href="https://www.robinrendle.com/notes/how-to-read-the-internet">why RSS is still so important to me</a> a while back:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...instead of being just another way to get posts from blogs that you were interested in, RSS fostered countless communities and friendships across oceans, across networks. And because of that I now think of RSS as a window into a room with the smartest, kindest people — and sometimes, on the rarest of occasions, they would open up the window and wave back.</p>
</blockquote>
The Careful Work2019-06-08T19:38:27Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/careful-work/<p>For as long as I can remember I’ve been inordinately stressed at work. I jump from problem to problem and work until the middle of the night and it never feels like…<em>enough</em>. I don’t remember the last time I returned home after a day and felt that my time had been particularly well spent.</p>
<p>No matter what I do I’m riddled with guilt that I could be doing so much more. And subsequently that turns the weekend into this terrifying and awful thing that roars towards me on a Thursday afternoon. And yes, I know that it’s super unhealthy to think of weekends as these scary and unstructured, amorphous blobs of zero productivity.</p>
<p>But also hey: fuck weekends.</p>
<hr />
<p>In a dream the other night I felt my body being forcibly squeezed through the space between our labels and form inputs in our giant web app. And so I panicked, waking up in a sweat having felt as if I’d been squidged through an infinite meat grinder of markup and CSS, each part of my body having been spliced through the margins in between.</p>
<p>Afterwards I can’t get back to sleep because I’m staring at the ceiling and I’m suddenly on the verge of tears – I’m thinking of all the other codebases out there, unknown and future codebases that will drive me half mad like this.</p>
<p>And I realize hey maybe I shouldn’t feel the way that I do. Maybe, just <em>maybe</em> all of this is wildly unhealthy and I’m driving myself towards the edge of a very steep cliff for no reason at all.</p>
<hr />
<p>I guess what I’m saying is that I want a new kind of work. One where I’m not stressed to the eyeballs or panicking in the bathroom because four people just slacked me about the same problem. Or feeling immense paranoia because I have to anticipate design changes weeks in advance. Or the frightened eyes that look at me after a particularly devastating and obsessive rant. Or the feeling that the web is rapidly turning into a junk heap because people don’t care about the languages upon which they’re built.</p>
<p><em>Goddammit</em> – I’m ranting again.</p>
<hr />
<p>I want a kind of work where I can calmly advance a single issue at a time, where every solution is better than an improvement of 1%. And maybe I’d like a kind of work that makes me smile when it’s complete, too.</p>
<p>Today when a project ends I’ve barely noticed because seventeen other items pop up that I need to deal with immediately and I find it impossible to predict my day. This feeling of unpredictability is rampant and I fear that my week will be consumed by something entirely out of my control; a modal breaking, a button malfunctioning, our fragile codebase’s radioactive core leaking damage into other parts of the system and turning them all into mulch.</p>
<hr />
<p>Last year I was talking to an engineer on our team who was leaving for Google and I asked him why. He replied that it was because of the impact. He wanted to work on something that touches millions of lives every day. And I let out a sigh so long it was as if I was a six thousand year old man. The sigh was so prolonged in fact that the buildings shook and the leaves from the hedges burst into the air around us. Dogs barked in the distance, sirens wailed, and the cement beneath my feet was cracked from the sheer force of apathy.</p>
<p>It was at that moment that I knew I want the kind of work that’s…not that. I don’t give a damn about impact or how many people use the thing I’m working on.</p>
<p>Because I know that small things are important, too.</p>
The World Wide Work2019-06-04T07:11:58Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/world-wide-work/<p>Ethan Marcotte’s <a href="https://newadventuresconf.com/2019/coverage/ethan/">talk at New Adventures</a> is very well much worth your time if you care for the web. Ethan broadens the scope of what accessibility means and argues that it goes beyond writing good HTML and CSS. It’s about making a web, and a world, for all of us.</p>
<p>Ethan’s talks are the kind I aspire to though; beautiful design, wondrous pacing, and an endless supply of wit. In short, I hate it.</p>
Eleventy and Netlify2019-06-02T02:42:34Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/eleventy-and-netlify/<p>Facing a three day break over the Memorial Day weekend, it dawned on me: it was time to redesign this website. Not the visuals or design, as <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/blogging-and-atrophy">I don’t believe in redesigning personal websites like that</a>. Instead, I needed to rethink how I publish writing and in the process I wanted to completely overhaul the technical underpinnings of it all.</p>
<p>For the past six years this blog has been a static website (there was a previous version that was in Wordpress but all that code and writing has thankfully been lost to the sands of time). Since then I’ve been using a combination of <a href="https://jekyllrb.com/">Jekyll</a> and <a href="https://siteleaf.com/">Siteleaf</a> to write content and publish my website. However, Jekyll happens to be very slow – taking what feels like hours to refresh a page when I change any content – and this would always happen to kill the writing spirit. Siteleaf is frustrating too, but in other ways. When I started experimenting with it I loved the UI for its ease of use but these days it feels like a lot more complexity than I really need.</p>
<p>What do I need now? Well, I just need a box to type markdown in and a button to publish it.</p>
<p>A while ago I started hacking together my own blog-publishing-tool in <a href="https://electronjs.org/">Electron</a>. It was a little app that would sit in the top of my macOS nav bar and once clicked it would fill the screen with an enormous white expanse – a little cursor in the top left and a little publish button at the bottom. After a while though I stopped working on it because it felt like I was trying to show off and perform the web design equivalent of a kick flip; we really don’t need flashy tools to publish on the web today, we just need something that works predictably and gets out of the way as much as possible.</p>
<p>Last week I realized that the more difficult that publishing process is, the less I’d be sure to write. Plus, I’ve become a bit of a stickler for performance lately and I’m starting to come to the conclusion that it’s the most important part of any good interface. In short, I wanted something easy, fast, and predictable.</p>
<p>Anywho. For about a year now I’d been watching <a href="https://www.zachleat.com/">Zach Leatherman</a> work on his own static site generator, <a href="https://www.11ty.io/">Eleventy</a>, and I kept hearing great things about it in passing. Folks kept mentioning how fast and easy it was to set up. So one night I started reading <a href="https://www.11ty.io/docs/">the Eleventy docs</a> to relax and calm myself down after a stressful day and behold! The docs happen to be absolutely fantastic and as I started going down the rabbit hole I re-read Zach’s post all about <a href="https://www.zachleat.com/web/introducing-eleventy/">why Eleventy exists</a> and how it works:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>While Eleventy uses JavaScript in node.js to transform templates into content, importantly (by default) it does not recommend nor force your HTML to include any Eleventy-specific client-side JavaScript. This is a core facet of the project’s intent and goals. We are not a JavaScript framework. We want our content decoupled as much as possible from Eleventy altogether, and because Eleventy uses templating engines that are Eleventy-independent, it gets us much closer to that goal.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So it was all of this that had swept me off my feet; the goals of the project, the ability to use multiple templating engines, and the charm of the docs themselves. I knew Eleventy was going to be the foundation of this website for the next decade to come.</p>
<p>On a separate note, for a long time I’d been hearing Chris <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grSxHfGoaeg">talk excitedly</a> about <a href="https://www.netlify.com/">Netlify</a> and how it gives front-end developers super powers. I wondered if it was all too good to be true, but no; all I had to do was hook it up to my GitHub repo, give it a few DNS magic whispers, and that was it! Now whenever I push some code to the <code>master</code> branch it will automatically deploy my website via Netlify in just a few minutes. Magic!</p>
<h2 id="migrating-from-jekyll" tabindex="-1">Migrating from Jekyll <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/eleventy-and-netlify/#migrating-from-jekyll" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>I looked into how difficult it would be to move over from Jekyll and I remembered Paul Robert Lloyd writing about <a href="https://24ways.org/2018/turn-jekyll-up-to-eleventy/">how to get started with Eleventy</a>. In that post, Paul describes some of the gotchas and for the most part all I had to do was reshuffle a few things. Some <a href="https://jekyllrb.com/docs/liquid/filters/">Liquid filters</a> weren’t supported but I figured it out eventually. This post about switching <a href="https://www.webstoemp.com/blog/from-jekyll-to-eleventy/">from Jekyll to Eleventy</a> by Jérôme Coupé was also very useful.</p>
<p>I have a <em>lot</em> of posts, projects, essays, and assets on this here website so I worried that migrating would be a giant pain but it really wasn’t. Even with all the debt that I had encouraged over the years it pretty much took a day of work to tie things together and figure everything out.</p>
<h2 id="bash-function" tabindex="-1">Bash function <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/eleventy-and-netlify/#bash-function" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>The one thing I loved about Siteleaf is that it would automagically create a markdown file and fill it with all the front-matter that’s required for it, like the date, tags, location and what-not. Now that I had removed Siteleaf from my site I wanted to make sure that it was still easy to create a markdown file and start writing without that GUI.</p>
<p>So last night I set up a bash function for the first time. And if you don’t mind me saying so, it’s pretty darn neat as whenever I want to start writing a new blog post I head to the command line and cast the following magic spell:</p>
<pre><code>$ blog eleventy-and-netlify
</code></pre>
<p>First that function will <code>cd</code> into <code>~/workspace/rr.com/_posts</code> which happens to be the folder where every blogpost is and then the function will create a new Markdown file. It’ll prepend today’s date to that string in the command and it will create a file name such as <code>2019-06-01-eleventy-and-netlify.md</code>. Then the function will hop into that file and add all the front matter data that Eleventy needs, just like this:</p>
<pre><code>---
title:
date:
city: San Francisco
country: California
categories:
tags:
extract:
---
</code></pre>
<p>The function will finally open this file up in Atom and after I fill all this data out I can start writing the blog post markdown content beneath it. That function happens to look like this by the way:</p>
<pre><code>function blog() {
IFS='' read -r -d '' String <<"EOF"
---
title:
date:
city: San Francisco
country: California
categories:
tags:
extract:
---
EOF
URL="~/workspace/rr.com/_posts/$(date +%Y-%m-%d-)${1}.md"
cd ~/workspace/rr.com/_posts && touch `date +%Y-%m-%d-`$1.md && echo "${String}" >> $_ && a $URL
}
</code></pre>
<p>It’s pretty gross code but it works and that’s good enough for me. I’ll be sure to tidy it up later and maybe add the date to the frontmatter automatically too.</p>
<p>But that’s it! Eleventy and Netlify will be the new foundations for this blog for the foreseeable future. I’m already impressed by how easy it was to set things up and I now feel like there’s nothing to stop me from writing.</p>
<p>Wait. Oh no...oh no. Now I have to write and I have no excuses to stop me from blogging...?</p>
<p>What have I done?</p>
In Defense of a Difficult Industry2019-06-02T01:20:23Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/in-defense-of-a-difficult-industy/<blockquote>
<p>I’ve made a mistake, a lifelong one, correlating advancements in technology with progress. Progress is the opening of doors and the leveling of opportunity, the augmentation of the whole human species and the protection of other species besides. Progress is cheerfully facing the truth, whether flooding coastlines or falling teen pregnancy rates, and thinking of ways to preserve the processes that work and mitigate the risks. Progress is seeing calmly, accepting, and thinking of others.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That’s Paul Ford in <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/why-we-love-tech-defense-difficult-industry/"><em>Why I (Still) Love Tech: In Defense of a Difficult Industry</em></a> – and I think for the longest time I felt the same way; I mistook technology for progress. But the longer I live in San Francisco the more I recognize how truly wrong this way of thinking is.</p>
Hey2019-05-11T22:22:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/hey/<p>Hey maybe the reason why accessibility is getting worse and the web is breaking is because folks still think that writing CSS and HTML is “lite” coding.</p>
<p>Hey maybe the way we fix the web is by paying front-end engineers the same as full-stack engineers.</p>
Wait, what is my job again?2019-05-11T07:11:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/wait-what-is-my-job-again/<p>I’ve had a lot of questions lately about what I do for a living. Not just from my family and friends but also, heck, even a few managers that I work with at Gusto. In general there’s a lot of folks who ask me what my job is and appear to be confused by it and I’m asked this question so often that it’s started to confuse even me.</p>
<p>And I kinda get why – my job straddles that Bermuda Triangle of front-end development and design and product management.</p>
<p>But I know for sure I’m not a product designer, or a front end engineer, or a manager though. I’m in the design org but... I pushed the second most amount of code in February? Although I wouldn’t call myself an engineer because I don’t care about the back end and I’ve spent the last decade learning about design (also I couldn’t do a fizz-buzz test if you put a gun to my head). And, sure, I plan a bunch of stuff and tell folks what to tackle but I don’t want to point things and I don’t care about being in 1x1s all day long. I don’t want to be a manager or a product designer or a front end engineer, really.</p>
<p>I want to do all of it.</p>
<p>L O N G S I G H</p>
<p>I think...I’m a design systems product manager? A technical PM? Someone that can figure out all the minutiae of implementing a plan – what to design, how to go about it – and getting people into a room to make a decision that will ship.</p>
<p>Jina Anne mentioned this sort of feeling a couple of years ago for <a href="https://24ways.org/2017/design-systems-and-hybrids/">24 Ways</a> where she writes about hybrid designer/developers:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sometimes, companies don’t know how to deal with hybrids. I’ve been told to choose a side, and have even been made to join a development team simply because I could code my designs (and then when I couldn’t deliver the same type of code my teammates could, and I felt like I wasn’t able to use my talents in the most effective way).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Being in this hybrid role has made me feel immensely lonely and isolated from the rest of my team as my work appears to be valuable just not in the same measurable way as pure designers or developers. To be honest it’s pretty dang frustrating and at many times it’s impacted my self-esteem and anxiety in gut-crushing ways.</p>
<p>I’ve gained a ton of weight over the past twelve months and I sort of think it’s because of this feeling, too.</p>
<p>Yet the weird thing about a design systems team is that there has to be at least one person that can toggle between both worlds and that’s because you need someone to understand the codebase and front-end development intimately as this will let you gauge the fires in front of you and figure out which ones your team must snuff out first. You also need to understand design, you need to be inundated with the culture of the org and you need to be okay with being constantly wrong about everything. You don’t need a product design background to fill this role although you need to be particular about certain things like component or illustration audits.</p>
<p>This weird job that I have is really just about giving talented people space to do what they think is best and picking up all the pieces that they might drop as they’re focused on some bigger part of the puzzle.</p>
<p>Also? You need to be really, really good at spreadsheets.</p>
<p>But that still doesn’t help describe what my current role is to folks at Gusto, or help me figure out what my career moving forwards is either. Hmph!</p>
<p>And that’s not because I care about ‘career growth’ – today I really enjoy the producing side of getting things done and I don’t care much for titles. I just want to make a good thing; I love unblocking engineers and setting deadlines for designers so that a project can go out in a timely fashion. I love building UI Kits and understanding the intricacies of Figma and I adore learning about accessibility issues. I love working on a library of rules and documentation and components and I adore pairing with designers or engineers to make a thing real great.</p>
<p>I love working quickly, shipping code, doing design and supporting my team in small but meaningful ways.</p>
<p>Is this a Design Technologist? Ugh I hate that term though and I feel like the English language just gasped at me for even contemplating saying it out loud. I guess the only other job title I could possibly have is something that sounds much more daring and exciting, something that truly defines what I do everyday.</p>
<p>Okay, okay, fine. You can call me a cyber designer I guess.</p>
Against metrics: how measuring performance by numbers backfires2019-05-07T05:54:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/against-metrics-how-measuring-performance-by-numbers-backfires/<p>Every company has a Judgement Day. Once in a while the peer reviews will roll in, the managers will require a self-evaluation, and you will be Judged. No matter what you do you’ll be assigned a rating, a number, a metric, and your job will be given a score out of ten or out of four. For a long time I’ve felt that this is a monumental waste of time but I’ve never been able to put this feeling into words.</p>
<p>Thankfully I don’t have to though because Jerry Muller has made my case for me in a brilliant piece for <em>Aeon</em> where he argues that measuring people and their performance is <a href="https://aeon.co/ideas/against-metrics-how-measuring-performance-by-numbers-backfires">a thoroughly bad idea</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>More and more companies, government agencies, educational institutions and philanthropic organisations are today in the grip of a new phenomenon. I’ve termed it ‘metric fixation’. The key components of metric fixation are the belief that it is possible – and desirable – to replace professional judgment (acquired through personal experience and talent) with numerical indicators of comparative performance based upon standardised data (metrics); and that the best way to motivate people within these organisations is by attaching rewards and penalties to their measured performance.</p>
<p>The rewards can be monetary, in the form of pay for performance, say, or reputational, in the form of college rankings, hospital ratings, surgical report cards and so on. But the most dramatic negative effect of metric fixation is its propensity to incentivise gaming: that is, encouraging professionals to maximise the metrics in ways that are at odds with the larger purpose of the organisation. If the rate of major crimes in a district becomes the metric according to which police officers are promoted, then some officers will respond by simply not recording crimes or downgrading them from major offences to misdemeanours. Or take the case of surgeons. When the metrics of success and failure are made public – affecting their reputation and income – some surgeons will improve their metric scores by refusing to operate on patients with more complex problems, whose surgical outcomes are more likely to be negative. Who suffers? The patients who don’t get operated upon.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I think I’ve moaned about useless data-gathering and data-fetishism in the past, but Jerry’s argument is a compelling one: most data collection is bullshit and putting a number on someone often makes them an immediately worse person. I’ve seen this countless times in my career – I’ve watched how folks can weasel their way through the report cards and self evaluations while genuinely talented, brilliant folks are crushed by a mindless, apathetic bureaucracy.</p>
<p>Any who, I really wish I could quote every sentence in this article but since I can’t, this is perhaps my favorite one-two punch from Jerry:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Compelling people in an organisation to focus their efforts on a narrow range of measurable features degrades the experience of work. Subject to performance metrics, people are forced to focus on limited goals, imposed by others who might not understand the work that they do. Mental stimulation is dulled when people don’t decide the problems to be solved or how to solve them, and there is no excitement of venturing into the unknown because the unknown is beyond the measureable. The entrepreneurial element of human nature is stifled by metric fixation.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Something something design systems something something.</p>
End of an Era2019-05-05T17:12:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/end-of-an-era/<p>Anna Wiener writing for the New Yorker on <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/jack-dorseys-ted-interview-and-the-end-of-an-era">what’s happening with Twitter</a> and Jack Dorsey’s failure to respond to the community:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The struggle to maintain Twitter is a double referendum: first, on the sustainability of scale; second, on the pervasive belief in Silicon Valley that technology can be neutral and should be treated as such. This idea, that systems will find their own equilibrium, echoes the libertarian spirit that has long animated the Valley and fails to account for actual power imbalances that exist in the real world. In 2019, it also suggests a certain lack of vision or imagination about what social technologies can, or should, be.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Boy I can’t stand this idea that technology should be left to its own devices in a short-lived bid for ‘neutrality’ – whatever the hell that means. Why can’t we make these systems honest, lovely, and beautiful instead? What’s so hard about making Twitter a tool for <em>good</em>?</p>
<p>Anyway, whenever I read about Jack and the future of Twitter it reminds me of an ancient Roman adage I think about often: <em>do justice, and let the skies fall.</em></p>
To hell, to hell...2019-05-01T02:15:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/to-hell-to-hell/<p>If you love sci-fi then you should read <em>Roadside Picnic</em> by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky immediately. A while back I wrote a bit about <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/roadside-picnic">why it’s my favorite sci-fi novel</a> of all time but it was only today that I read the afterword by Boris, which was written years after the fall of the Soviet Union, and in it he describes the nightmarish hell that was publishing in the 70’s and 80’s under Soviet bureaucracy:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>At first, I was looking forward to using this afterword to tell the story of publishing <em>Picnic</em>: naming once-hated names; jeering to my heart’s content at the cowards, idiots, informers, and scoundrels; astounding the reader with the absurdity, idiocy and meanness of the world we’re all from; being ironic and instructive, deliberately objective and ruthless, benevolent and caustic all at once. And now I’m sitting here, looking at these folders, and realizing that I’m hopelessly late and that no one needs me—not my irony, not my generosity, and not my burnt-out hatred. They have ceased to exist, those once-powerful organizations with almost unlimited right to allow and to hinder; they have ceased to exist and are forgotten to such an extent that it would be tedious and dull to explain to the present-day reader who is who, why it didn’t make sense to complain to the Department of Culture of the CC, why the only thing to do was to complain to the Department of Print and Propaganda, and who were Albert Andreevich Beliaev, Pyotr Nilovich Demichev, and Mikhail Vasilyevich Zimyanin—and these were the tigers and elephants of the Soviet ideological fauna, rulers of destinies, deciders of fates! Who remembers them today, and who cares about those of them who are still among the living? So then why bother with the small fry—the shrill crowd of petty bureaucrats of ideology, the countless ideological demons, who caused untold and immeasurable harm and whose vileness and meanness require (as they liked to write in the nineteenth century) a mightier, sharper, and more experienced pen than my own? I don’t even want to mention them here—let them be swallowed up by the past, like evil spirits, and disappear...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It took <em>eight painstaking years</em> of correspondence between all the agencies of Moscow and endless letters back and forth between the two brothers (one of which Boris explains the latest delay to Arkady: “To hell, to hell...”). But after all the years of arguments between bureaucrats and agencies, Boris realized that he had it all wrong. The system wasn’t trying to stop them from publishing their book because it was ideological – it was because the language was bleak and hopeless, where most sci-fi at the time was uplifting and fantastical:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It didn’t even cross our minds that the issue had nothing to do with ideology. They, those quintessential “bloody fools,” <em>actually did think this way</em>: that language must be colorless, smooth, and glossy as possible and certainly shouldn’t be at all coarse; that science fiction necessarily has to be fantastic and on no account should have anything to do with crude, observable, and brutal reality; that the reader must in general be protected from reality—let him live by daydreams, reveries, and beautiful incorporeal ideas...</p>
</blockquote>
Design, system.2019-04-29T06:14:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/design-system/<p>I just re-read this piece from Ethan Marcotte <a href="https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/design-system/">all about design systems</a> and how it’s kinda easy to forget that a system is really a collection of tools, and if those tools aren’t working then that’s a problem:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Let’s say you, a hard-working designer on deadline, have to add a hero image to a page. Your company’s invested quite a bit of time and energy in creating a pattern library, or perhaps an entire design system, so you look to it for a bit of guidance. Unfortunately, none of the existing patterns are quite right: perhaps the proportions are off, or the available options don’t cover the specific combination of image, copy, and color you’ve been asked to incorporate. So: what do you do? Well, chances are high you go ahead and create a new pattern, and go on with your day.</p>
<p>It’s easy for an organization to look at that one-off pattern as a problem of compliance, of not following the established rules. And in many cases, that might be true! But it’s also worth recognizing when a variation’s teaching you a lesson: namely, that your design system isn’t meeting the needs of the people who’re using it. Maybe there was a pattern that met our designer’s needs, but they weren’t able to find it; or maybe they’ve identified a gap between the business’ needs, and the patterns available to them to meet those needs. In both cases, it’s important to have mechanisms to receive that feedback, and adapt your design system accordingly.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I think there’s also something that needs to be said for <em>design value</em> here. If this new design that’s outside of the design system doesn’t solve the issue in a significantly improved way then I would say that’s a problem of a different kind. There’s almost always a middle ground that can be taken that doesn’t involve breaking the system in my experience.</p>
Getting to the bottom of line height in Figma2019-04-27T18:40:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/getting-to-the-bottom-of-line-height-in-figma/<p>Marcin Wichary has written yet another outstanding piece about how the team at Figma has redesigned <a href="https://www.figma.com/blog/line-height-changes">how they treat line-height and spacing</a>. But I can’t stop thinking about this bit where Marcin writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The history of web design can be seen as a set of tensions between designers wanting things to be positioned with utmost precision, and the web pushing back on some of that control. One of the unexpected casualties of that push and pull was line height. The early web didn’t allow for easy vertical centering of text — cue literal decades of jokes about aligning a text to an icon next to it being the hardest problem in computer science — but line height provided a quick workaround for a situation much more common in user interface design than in the world of print.</p>
</blockquote>
Pairing is the key to evangelizing your design system2019-04-26T23:03:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/pairing-is-the-key-to-evangelizing-your-design-system/<p>A while ago I wrote a piece for the folks at Figma all about one of the best ways to evangelize your design system: <a href="https://www.figma.com/blog/pairing-is-the-key-to-evangelizing-your-design-system">pairing with designers and engineers</a>. And in that piece I collected a ton of thoughts over the last year or so doing this work:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One of the hardest parts about building a design system is convincing other people to use it. It's easy to fall into the "us vs. them" trap by constantly calling out "bad behavior": Don't use blue. Don't put that there. Make sure that works on mobile. Don't write CSS like that. This form is not accessible. Why did you need a new component there?</p>
<p>If you're not careful, this attitude can lead to a poisonous culture in your design org. A design systems team needs to focus on more than just being right; they have to be helpful, too.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Right now I’m collecting all of these stray thoughts into a big ol’ talk that I’m cooking up about design systems. So if you happen to run a conference and you’re looking for someone to ramble passionately about these things for an hour then please get in touch. There will be hand-waving! There will be design system mistakes on display! There will be a lot of wholesome fonts!</p>
Isolationism2019-04-21T11:39:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/isolationism/<p>It’s about five minutes before we start shouting about Brexit. I find myself sat in the car, my brother driving me and my dad through the glorious mountain ranges and valleys of Wales. It’s the sort of landscape to make it appear as if all this had to have been planned. This type of beauty looks coordinated and engineered.</p>
<p>But despite the landscape I am terribly embarrassed for my father and brother, two people who I happen to love.</p>
<p>As we’re driving through this landscape I think back to all the late night phone calls trying to convince them that Brexit is a foolish and cruel idea. I think back to when I first heard members of my family defend Farage and Johnson and (sweet heavenly lord) Rees-Mogg. How are these sheisters the men we find inspiring? How are these the men that we trust?</p>
<p>I ask myself these questions on the drive back to Plymouth through these beautiful twisting valleys. But there’s one in particular that I’m obsessed with: how can I love the people who want to hurt and break our union?</p>
<p>And is this love bigger than Brexit?</p>
<hr />
<p>As I walk around the park near my brother’s house I spot a small English flag flapping in the wind on a pole in someone’s garden. Since 2016 I’ve noticed this flag become more popular in people’s homes and there’s something about its resurgent prominence that upsets me. As if somehow the meaning of the symbol changed whilst I was away. And after staring at it for some time I realize in a flash that the English flag is now a symbol of isolationism.</p>
<p>After Brexit, the English flag is to the United Kingdom what the Confederate flag is to America.</p>
<p>It’s a symbol of watching Syria collapse and turning our backs on them. It’s a symbol of looking at Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland, looking at this rich culture and heritage between us all, and tearing it up and running away. It’s a symbol of casting aside our economic and cultural bonds with the largest single market on earth and it’s a symbol of an ideological poison. An idea that can’t be stopped, that can’t be expunged or removed. An idea that has poisoned the well and now we’re all drinking from it, despite both sides knowing that it’s poison.</p>
<p>The next day I’m walking around London and I spot the English flag in a shop window and I clench my fist and try to hold back tears.</p>
<p>The English flag is an embarrassment to us all.</p>
<hr />
<p>This is mass hysteria on a scale I’ve never seen before. It’s in every conversation, on every television and radio, printed on every newspaper, and I swear to god every small act between members of my family.</p>
<p>As soon as I land I want to leave. And this fills me with so much guilt that I struggle to sleep at night.</p>
<hr />
<p>On the train back to London yesterday I was listening to James O’Brien’s show on the LBC where he takes calls from Brexiteers and hopes to explain how they’ve been lied to and cheated. But for the most part he does so in a very kind way. He sees correcting their mistakes and facts as an act of kindness. An act of intellectual courtesy and respect.</p>
<p>Although when a particularly illogical or cruel argument is hurled his way James does lose it sometimes. He’ll sigh into his microphone and roll his arms over his head, unable to grapple with the sheer ridiculousness of the situation.</p>
<p>Overall the show is pretty difficult to listen to but it’s...remarkable, too. James focus is on facts rather than opinions and he confronts every half witted and dim rhetorical device uttered on his show. “What was the prize?” he asks a Brexiteer in one segment. “When you won the election, what was the prize?”</p>
<p>It reminds me that this is what great journalism is really. James’s show is the living embodiment of Orwell’s essay on Politics and the English Language – a master class in how to think and structure your thoughts coherently.</p>
<p>Another caller, in a shroud of tears and stutters, apologizes for his vote after he listens to James’ show. He can barely say the words. “What have I done...what have I done to my country?”</p>
<p>Any other presenter would have taken this as an opportunity to gloat or say I told you so but not James. He tells the caller that isn’t his fault. He was lied to and tricked by wealthy newspaper companies and fraudsters that wanted nothing more than to be elected. You can tell that James is overwhelmed though.</p>
<p>“Don’t be sorry,” he says as he leans towards the microphone. “Be angry.”</p>
Some Unsolicited Newsletter Advice2019-04-18T12:36:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/some-unsolicited-newsletter-advice/<p><a href="https://daverupert.com/2019/04/some-unsolicited-blogging-advice/">Dave gathered some thoughts around blogging</a> the other day and I agree with a lot of them but <em>especially</em> this one:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If you ever sit down to write and the words don’t come out, don’t write. Close the computer. Do something else.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This had me wondering what might be good advice for newsletters based on my experience with Adventures and the CSS Tricks newsletter. Here’s what I’ve got so far:</p>
<h2 id="focus-on-one-story-at-a-time" tabindex="-1">Focus on one story at a time <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/some-unsolicited-newsletter-advice/#focus-on-one-story-at-a-time" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>I try not to have a lot of disparate thoughts, topics, and links in one email. I love [insert cool artist’s name here] but their newsletter is difficult to read because it’s all over the place. One minute they’re talking about a novel they like and the next they’re talking about an illustration style they like. It just feels like too many separate ideas to me and I struggle to focus on them. I guess what I’m looking for from my inbox is one small story once a week.</p>
<h2 id="keep-'em-small" tabindex="-1">Keep ‘em small <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/some-unsolicited-newsletter-advice/#keep-'em-small" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Don’t write long emails. Think about how folks read their email; it’s not a beautiful experience and typography is still pretty dang hard to get right. After following a lot of newsletters, like Matt Taibi’s Hate Inc., I found that I only have enough time to read one with a coffee. Preferably on a Saturday morning. Any longer than that and it starts to feel like something they should post on a website or an idea that belongs in print.</p>
<h2 id="don't-cherish-your-ideas" tabindex="-1">Don't cherish your ideas <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/some-unsolicited-newsletter-advice/#don't-cherish-your-ideas" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Don’t worry if it’s perfect prose or the most insightful batch of ideas. Don’t even worry if it’s an original idea. If there’s one thing that Chris has taught me from CSS Tricks is that if I find something interesting then other folks are likely to as well. No matter how obscure or weird the topic might be. People will always read stuff that’s written in an excited and charming format.</p>
<h2 id="republish-and-keep-experimenting" tabindex="-1">Republish and keep experimenting <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/some-unsolicited-newsletter-advice/#republish-and-keep-experimenting" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Craig Mod once wrote about how he would advise writers to publish stuff everywhere to see what sticks. Try Wordpress and Medium, try self publishing and publish the same piece in multiple formats and platforms. The reason why is because you should keep experimenting with writing styles and your own voice. Plus it’s good practice to figure out what applications and processes you like to boot. But beware: each platform will encourage a certain kind of writing.</p>
<h2 id="always-write-to-a-best-friend" tabindex="-1">Always write to a best friend <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/some-unsolicited-newsletter-advice/#always-write-to-a-best-friend" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>I used to send emails to a friend in Australia. We would write to each other about design and typography as well as how our lives were going. And I cherished those emails because of how honest and sincere they were. It was a conversation between like minded friends and so the tone of each email was deliriously excited and informal. This is what I think newsletters crave to be. It should sound as if a clever friend wants to share something with you urgently; punctuation and grammar be damned.</p>
The Day the Dinosaurs Died2019-04-17T13:04:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died/<p>Douglas Preston investigates <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-dinosaurs-died">the oldest murder mystery on the planet</a> when he takes a meandering and jolly wander about the extinction of the dinosaurs and almost all life on earth. Douglas writes in a way that is both poetic and teeming with theories that I had never heard of before:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A few years ago, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory used what was then one of the world’s most powerful computers, the so-called Q Machine, to model the effects of the impact. The result was a slow-motion, second-by-second false-color video of the event. Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. When Earth’s crust rebounded, a peak higher than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, but the blast looked nothing like a nuclear explosion, with its signature mushroom cloud. Instead, the initial blowout formed a “rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere, some of it fanning out over North America. Much of the material was several times hotter than the surface of the sun, and it set fire to everything within a thousand miles. In addition, an inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass, called tektites, and blanketed the Western Hemisphere.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I love writing like this. Douglas doesn’t rush, he takes his time with every sentence and every image.</p>
Performance and Behavior2019-04-11T07:35:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/performance-and-behavior/<p>I’m hoofing it around London today preparing some last minute things for my visa. The weather could not be more beautiful as puffy little clouds float above me in a cerulean blue playground.</p>
<p>But as I walk around I’m entirely reliant on this patchy 3G network from my American data plan and I’m certainly not used to having these sorts of limits. In fact it makes me wince each time I check my phone. At home in California it feels like I have an infinite amount of internet that’s constantly blasted in my face but the web here is so incredibly slow to the point that’s it’s almost unusable.</p>
<p>Through this lens of a patchy network I see this landscape differently.</p>
<p>These limits are changing my behavior in small but significant ways – I can’t look up tickets for shows, search for where my hotel room is, or use Twitter much. Maps feels like it’s running out of gas and, on the web, images and fonts refuse to load at all. These aren’t essential things of course but they’re enough to change my behavior.</p>
<p>Up to now I think most folks have talked about performance from the perspective of accessibility. That we must make our websites fast out of kindness. But I wonder how much is lost economically and culturally because of slow websites. Like say every website loaded in 500ms or less – what effect would that have on our economy and society?</p>
<p>How would our landscape change?</p>
Delirious in London2019-04-09T12:36:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/delirious-in-london/<p>I just hopped off an eleven hour flight from San Francisco and I feel like I’ve drunk a couple bottles of wine by myself. I’m waiting for my hotel room to open up so I can crawl under the bed, roll up into a ball, and sleep for an eternity.</p>
<p>Right now though I’m sat in a cafe and passing the time by reading week notes from <a href="https://paulrobertlloyd.com/2019/04/weeknotes_13">Paul</a> and <a href="https://andy-bell.design/wrote/week-notes-11/">Andy</a>, as well as becoming one with this piece on the <a href="https://popula.com/2019/04/02/heaven-or-high-water/">climate crisis in Miami and the booming real estate market there</a>. I’m also trying to parse this piece by Luke Jackson all about <a href="https://formidable.com/blog/2019/no-build-step/">how to avoid building yet another React app</a> but I feel like I need a couple of days to myself to unwind from web tech stuff and curl up with a few books and long stories instead.</p>
<p>Speaking of which, on the plane I read my extremely-online pal Robinson Meyer’s piece on <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/12/ocasio-cortez-green-new-deal-winning-climate-strategy/576514/">how Democrats plan to make climate policy exciting</a>. It’s from way back last year but it’s marvelous and Rob perfectly describes the difficulty with passing legislation for a problem like the climate crisis:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I have come to think of this tension as climate policy’s Boring as Dirt problem: the BAD problem. The BAD problem recognizes that climate change is an interesting challenge. It is scary and massive and apocalyptic, and its attendant disasters (especially hurricanes, wildfires, and floods) make for good TV. But the policies that will address climate change do not pack the same punch. They are technical and technocratic and quite often dull. At the very least, they will never be as immediate as climate change itself. Floods are powerful, but stormwater management is arcane. Wildfires are ravenous, but electrical-grid upgrades are tedious. Climate change is frightening, but dirt is boring. That’s the BAD problem.</p>
<p>Some version of the BAD problem probably exists for every issue. Paying for exorbitant cancer drugs is an outrage, but advocating for state-level insurance laws that could reduce their cost is onerous. In a way, addressing the BAD problem is part of what elected officials are supposed to do in a republic. But it’s a special problem for climate change, with its all-encompassing cause and countless diffuse harms. To fix climate change, you have to pass laws about dirt. Then you have to keep them passed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Rob then digs into how you pass that kind of legislation: give people superpowers. It’s a great piece and I don’t want to spoil any more of it. Just go read the dang thing.</p>
<p>I got coffee with Rob last week on a rather blustery and rainy day in the city. As we watched folks outside fight the rain we joked about writing and journalism, what makes us petty, and how we pick fights that we’re almost always going to lose.</p>
<p>Anyway, I’m rambling and delirious but it was one of those rare moments where someone who I admire and deeply respect popped out of the Internet and instead of being an attention seeking jerk they happen to be just as charming and brilliant as they are online.</p>
You need front-end engineers2019-03-25T19:53:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/you-need-front-end-engineers/<p>The strangest thing about front-end development is that it’s such a rare collection of skills that happen to be so undervalued today.</p>
<p>You want accessibility? You need front-end engineers.</p>
<p>You want performance? You need front-end engineers.</p>
<p>You want good design? You need front-end engineers.</p>
<p>The funny thing is that front-end engineers are not compensated in the same way that any other rare employment resource is treated. At least in my experience. So what is it about front-end development that makes it so hard to explain and make the case for?</p>
<p>Why is it so hard for us all to see that front-end development is not only important but vital for our businesses and our day-to-day lives?</p>
This One Technology Will Solve All of Your Problems2019-03-25T17:56:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/this-one-technology-will-solve-all-of-your-problems/<p>This post by Kelly Sutton all about <a href="https://kellysutton.com/2019/03/23/this-one-technology-will-solve-all-of-your-problems.html">how a new technology is rarely the solution to our problems</a> is my new favorite thing:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Lately at work, I’ve found myself being a particularly conservative and sometimes curmudgeonly voice in the room when it comes to technical decisions. There’s no particular authority bestowed upon me, but at times I’ll get asked to weigh in on technical decisions for the engineering org. When it comes to introducing new technology, my response usually takes the form of “Why now?”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I particularly like this bit, too:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...new technology seems easy because we don’t know anything about it yet.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I want to underline this sentence with !!!s and !?!?s because I adore it entirely and see how this thread ties into what I’m seeing going on with the CSS community at the moment.</p>
The Harmony of the System2019-03-20T03:23:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/design-systems-and-portfolios/<p>I wrote up some opinions I have about <a href="https://css-tricks.com/design-systems-and-portfolios/">design systems and portfolios</a> for CSS-Tricks:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In my experience working with design systems, I’ve found that I have to sacrifice my portfolio to do it well. Unlike a lot of other design work where it’s relatively easy to present Dribbble-worthy interfaces and designs, I fear that systems are quite a bit trickier than that.</p>
<p>You could make things beautiful, but the best work that happens on a design systems team often isn’t beautiful. In fact, a lot of the best work isn’t even <em>visible</em>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/jenniesyip/status/1106731290122813440">Jennie Yip replied</a> and mentioned that there is a way to show design systems work in a portfolio, pointing to <a href="https://jocelyn-wong.com/project-modal-component.html">the lovely work of Jocelyn Wong</a>. But I guess maybe my point got lost in the rant a little.</p>
<p>What I was trying to say in that post is that making beautiful things is, quite frankly, easier than making a beautiful system – and to do that well you often have to sacrifice or compromise the beauty of this one component or this one project for the overall harmony of the system.</p>
<p>I mentioned to one of our designers today that certain parts of our UI are at war with one another – or that perhaps our entire design team is in a stalemate where our weapons are drawn and are at eachother’s throats. Cards and alerts, illustrations and animations – we use these to hijack attention but this increases the stakes for everyone else on the team. Now to get their UI noticed they have to escalate things even further – bolder text, bigger animations, kaboom!</p>
<p>The goal of a design systems team is to reduce the stalemate, to stop the civil war that’s quietly raging inside an organization. And to do that they must sacrifice their portfolio by <a href="http://blog.capwatkins.com/the-boring-designer">making things boring</a>.</p>
1% Better2019-03-20T03:21:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/1-percent-better/<p>Here’s an opinion without any facts or evidence: I only care about making the design system 1% better every day. If that means deleting a bit of code that doesn’t have any impact whatsoever then that’s okay. If it means changing the font weight of this one component to be slightly more legible then that’s okay too. So long as every day there’s an improvement of some kind.</p>
<p>You might argue that all these 1% changes are distractions from much larger projects that might have an enormous impact.</p>
<p>My argument would be that those massive, revolutionary projects will never happen. Instead it’s best to slowly move towards where we want to, step by step, so that we gather momentum over time.</p>
<p>1% today is better than 50% tomorrow or some distant and impossible far-flung future.</p>
Building a UI Kit in Figma2019-03-17T20:01:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/building-a-ui-kit-in-figma/<p>I’ve been working on our UI Kit at Gusto for a couple of months now – this is a project in Figma that lets other designers on our team examine our components and get a better picture of what’s available to use in their own designs. There’s buttons and forms, typographic styles and colors, a verifiable cornucopia of icons and illustrations to reuse and, in time, improve.</p>
<p>The other day I changed one symbol in our UI Kit though and watched as hundreds of components updated their colors, fonts, and other styles, saving me about a whole day of work. And I realized that being slow and considerate – putting all this effort into how things are built – really pays off in the long run.</p>
<p>Here’s some very rough notes about that process, how I went about organizing the kit, and all the challenges I encountered along the way.</p>
<h2 id="understanding-the-problem" tabindex="-1">Understanding the problem <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/building-a-ui-kit-in-figma/#understanding-the-problem" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Before I opened up Figma I jotted down a quick list of all the things that our team needed to make great work. After a bit of interviewing and research I found that our designers need to:</p>
<ul>
<li>learn what components exist</li>
<li>have a single source of truth where all the documentation lives</li>
<li>learn about our shared brand and UX patterns</li>
<li>figure out where and how to install our fonts</li>
<li>understand the limitations of the system (so that could be typography, colors, and our grid)</li>
</ul>
<p>With that in mind I spent a ton of time looking through different UI Kits, such as the <a href="https://www.figma.com/file/divF7pYDKIMDfrOH0rQbRa/Android-GUI-by-Great-Simple-Studio-(Copy)?node-id=0%3A4160">Android GUI</a> or how the team at Shopify has designed their kit for <a href="https://polaris.shopify.com/resources/polaris-ui-kit">Polaris</a>. This all gave me a ton of inspiration as to how to structure things so after that research I believed that our kit could be broken up into four pages in a Figma doc; Getting Started, Components, Patterns, and Symbols.</p>
<h2 id="getting-started" tabindex="-1">Getting started <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/building-a-ui-kit-in-figma/#getting-started" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>This page would inform designers what the UI Kit is and how to go about using it as well as any setup stuff they need to know. Today that page happens to look like this:</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<img class="cell-b40" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/getting-started-page.jpg" />
</div>
<p>Ideally this page should kind of act as an FAQ for design systems questions – who the team is, how to contact us, and the basics of how to use Figma.</p>
<h2 id="components" tabindex="-1">Components <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/building-a-ui-kit-in-figma/#components" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>This would be a list of all the components that are available to our design team as well as default typography styles, colors, and icons. Pretty standard stuff that you’ve likely seen a million times before already:</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<img class="cell-b40" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/components-page.jpg" />
</div>
<p>I spent a ton of time ordering this page and thinking about how designers might quickly skim read this doc to find a specific section – like Alerts. But the cool thing about Figma is that you can send links to specific frames in a project which I find super helpful when I’m pointing designers to a component via Slack.</p>
<p>(I think the hyperlinkability of Figma is the single greatest reason why I would recommend it to anyone else out there starting a design system.)</p>
<h2 id="patterns" tabindex="-1">Patterns <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/building-a-ui-kit-in-figma/#patterns" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>We needed a section of the kit where designers could learn about our common UX patterns and learn how to combine certain components together. This page would show templates and more complete UI examples:</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<img class="cell-b40" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/patterns-page.jpg" />
</div>
<h2 id="symbols" tabindex="-1">Symbols <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/building-a-ui-kit-in-figma/#symbols" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>We also needed a <code>Symbols</code> page which (much like in other kits) would be where I make all the Master Components that those three pages above inherit from. What we needed was a private space that other designers don’t interact with but is where I can have all the different variants of buttons and forms.</p>
<p>In Shopify’s Polaris design system they have their own web UI kit which happens to be in Sketch and they have a dedicated page for this that’s pretty nearly organized:</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<img class="cell-b40" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/aegouahepiguaeg.jpg" />
</div>
<p>The other nifty thing about Figma is that you can move that <code>Symbols</code> page into a separate document entirely and make it private. This means that other designers won’t be able to accidentally edit or destroy those components as they’re looking through our kit.</p>
<p>Anyway, here’s a zoomed-in version of just one section of our symbols:</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<img class="cell-b40" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/symbols-figma.jpg" />
</div>
<h2 id="naming-components" tabindex="-1">Naming components <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/building-a-ui-kit-in-figma/#naming-components" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>If you look closely at the image above you might notice that weird naming convention for the components: <code>Input/Default</code>, <code>Input/Focus</code> and <code>Input/Error</code>. That <code>/</code> is a hack that helps Figma identify which components are instances of one another and I only found out about this after watching <a href="https://help.figma.com/article/66-components">a video tutorial</a> (and I highly recommend that before you start working with Figma that you go through all of these).</p>
<p>So wait – how do you use instances and why are they neat? Well, if you were in a new Figma doc and threw in our <code>Input/Default</code> component you’ll notice that on the right hand side there’s an <code>Instances</code> menu and by selecting that dropdown you’ll see that you can easily switch between the error and focus inputs we setup with that <code>/</code>:</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<video autoplay="" autostart="" loop="" class="cell-b40">
<source src="https://robinrendle.com/images/error-states-animation.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
</video>
</div>
<p>Neat, huh? I wrote a little bit more about <a href="https://css-tricks.com/nesting-components-in-figma/">nesting components in Figma</a> a while back but I think the main benefit is that folks on our design team can easily see what all the variations of a component are and manipulate components and their various subcomponents.</p>
<p>You could set this up in your own kit to switch between different themes of a component, such as <code>ButtonPrimary/Darkmode</code> or something. But at Gusto we use this in a couple of clever ways: we have a few user profiles where the UI will change depending whether you’re an employee or an employer. And so I created a <code>Layout</code> component that lets folks switch between the different UIs:</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<video autoplay="" autostart="" loop="" class="cell-b40">
<source src="https://robinrendle.com/images/paoeoiaeg.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
</video>
</div>
<p>So as you can see we have different kinds of <code>PageTitle</code> – a regular old title as well as tabs and a progress bar for flows. Ideally designers shouldn’t have to keep dragging in new components and aligning them all over the place and figuring out spacing each time – with Instances we can stop some of those repetitive tasks.</p>
<p>The reason why I’m bragging about this is because I’ve found it’s saved me a TON of time drawing these things. And toggling these components on and off and replacing them with variants feels like working with a space-age design tool.</p>
<h2 id="a-note-on-styles" tabindex="-1">A Note on Styles <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/building-a-ui-kit-in-figma/#a-note-on-styles" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>At Gusto we have a color palette that can be used to design new components or make slight adjustments to existing ones. It’s what we call a CSS “helper” where you can write code like this in React to change the color of some text:</p>
<pre><code><p className='c-water-500'>This is some text</p>
<p className='c-salt-1000'>This is some more text</p>
</code></pre>
<p>Ideally we probably shouldn’t be using it like that but that just gives you an idea of what’s possible with these utility classes. My point is that we have a strict set of color variables and in Figma I set up Color Styles to match them. In the right hand side of every new doc made at Gusto you’ll see our default text styles (which matches our default HTML styles) and our variables (that matches our Sass map with those hex values added):</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/color-styles-figma.jpg" alt="color-styles-figma.jpg" /></p>
<p>This is great because often I don’t think designers will even need to view our UI Kit at all – once they start a new doc they can just select a color or a text style from the side bar without moving away from their design.</p>
<p>To make this color palette I had to go through our front-end and understand our system and make sure that the variable names match up exactly – and that’s when I discovered a lot of this work requires constantly diving into the front-end, looking at what’s currently possible, and then making a system in Figma to reflect that.</p>
<p>Anyway, when a designer starts a new Figma doc (it would be so neat if you could do this by typing in <a href="http://figma.com/new">http://figma.com/new</a> or something like how Google Docs does things) they can immediately use the component from our design system by toggling <code>option</code> + <code>2</code>.</p>
<p>On the left hand side there’ll be a list of all the components available to them which they can also drag and drop into their designs without having to head over to our kit.</p>
<h2 id="onboarding-designers-is-pretty-dang-easy" tabindex="-1">Onboarding designers is pretty dang easy <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/building-a-ui-kit-in-figma/#onboarding-designers-is-pretty-dang-easy" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>I think perhaps the second greatest advantage of using Figma over other design tools is that I don’t have to worry about which version of the UI Kit, or even which version of Figma to that extent, is being used by our design team. Everyone is constantly on the latest version and so I don’t have to manage software versions or bug folks to update things.</p>
<p>On day one of starting Gusto we can just point them to <a href="http://figma.com/">figma.com</a> and they’re off to the races!</p>
<p>Although one thing we have to make sure is that everyone on our team is familiar with Figma’s way of doing things. Using a component library directly in a design tool is still a pretty novel concept for many and so we have to sit down with designers during onboarding to make sure they have a firm grasp of this stuff. A short while ago we started onboarding our designers and familiarizing them with our design system so that we get to chat to them about how Figma works. The neat thing is that this gives us an opportunity to get to introduce ourselves and explain how our design systems team can work with them and their design process, too.</p>
<h2 id="random-note:-overlays-are-super-neat" tabindex="-1">Random note: overlays are super neat <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/building-a-ui-kit-in-figma/#random-note:-overlays-are-super-neat" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>One pattern that I really like is the concept of <a href="https://www.figma.com/blog/introducing-overlays-taking-prototyping-to-the-next-layer/">Overlays</a> in Figma, as they noted on their blog:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We reimagined the basic delivery of overlays. Now after you add a prototype link to connect two frames, you will see a new option in the property panel. This option will allow you to set the destination frame as an overlay. Once selected, you can customize where the overlay is placed and how it should appear.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So with this functionality in mind I drew our modal, drawer and popover components as a series of Overlays that designers can more easily use to mockup their ideas:</p>
<img class="cell-b40" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/Screenshot%202019-03-17%2015.34.12.jpg" />
<p>Anything I can do to make their prototyping experience just a little bit better is worth it in my opinion. However! In Figma there are a ton of things I haven’t figured out yet...</p>
<h2 id="a-lot-of-stuff-is-missing-from-the-kit-today" tabindex="-1">A lot of stuff is missing from the Kit today <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/building-a-ui-kit-in-figma/#a-lot-of-stuff-is-missing-from-the-kit-today" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>I could probably do a much better job of styling the Kit and the components that house things by making them feel a bit more Gusto-y and improve the overall visual fidelity of things. For now, and out of a lack of time, I think things are fine enough though.</p>
<p>I guess the important part to remember here is that – even if a kit isn’t exactly the pinnacle of quality – having a half-baked UI Kit is better than nothing at all.</p>
<p>Also I think our design patterns need a ton of love and this is the space where we’ve currently spent the least amount of time. Ideally we could give detailed guidance around typographic hierarchy and form design as well as how to position things in our templates or modals and drawers. I reckon this will slowly improve over time as our team leaves refactoring mode and starts to think more holistically about ways to improve the user experience in our app.</p>
<h2 id="buttons-are-for-nerds" tabindex="-1">Buttons are for nerds <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/building-a-ui-kit-in-figma/#buttons-are-for-nerds" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Okay so I don’t know why I typed that, I guess I just assumed that at this point no-one is reading this thing and I can type whatever I want. But also seriously, buttons are kinda hard to work with in Figma because when you import a symbol you often want to change the text inside it – but! – the button can’t increase depending on the content within it.</p>
<p>In some cases this means that designers have had to detach a component from its Master before changing the text inside and increasing the width/height of the component manually – and that’s kinda frustrating.</p>
<p>At Gusto we’re not so worried about updating old designs with new styles but I can see why encouraging designers to unlink their design from the core symbols is a no-deal thing for other companies.</p>
<h2 id="keeping-things-in-sync-is-tough" tabindex="-1">Keeping things in sync is tough <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/building-a-ui-kit-in-figma/#keeping-things-in-sync-is-tough" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>It’s really easy for the UI Kit and the front-end to get out of sync with one another and it feels like a lot of repetitive work to change a front-end thing like the :focus state of something and then have to boot up Figma to change that style in the kit, too. It requires that someone like me is intimately familiar with our front-end code and our design.</p>
<p>For now the way I’m justifying all this extra work is that 1. designers need to use these components in their designs and if I save them 10 minutes drawing things then I’m okay with that and 2. I can’t think of a better solution for now.</p>
<p>This is why I’m eyeing Framer X and wondering if I can just pipe in our Component Library directly into it. But I don’t think that’s going to be possible for our team anytime soon.</p>
<h2 id="making-symbols-responsive-is-also-ugh" tabindex="-1">Making symbols responsive is also ugh <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/building-a-ui-kit-in-figma/#making-symbols-responsive-is-also-ugh" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Also I’m not sure how to name or handle responsive components. For example, our Table component has one style on desktop but another one on mobile: at smaller screen sizes we break each row into a separate card so that it’s easier to scan and the user doesn’t have to scroll all over the place to read a single row.</p>
<p>However – how should I name these components in Figma? Should I create a <code>Table/Desktop</code> and a <code>Table/Mobile</code> component and style each uniquely? In an ideal world if you decreased the horizontal width of a regular <code>Table</code> component it would snap between these two components automatically just like a media query. My point is that I <em>really</em> don’t want to have to draw two versions of every component we have. It’s hard enough maintaining one desktop version of everything.</p>
<p>The more I think about this stuff the more I realize that the codebase has to be your real source of truth and all design tools will have to in some way pipe into your component library. I can definitely see how at larger orgs and design teams that this could simply be impossible.</p>
<h2 id="aligning-things-in-a-grid-with-figma-is-still-kinda-annoyin'-too" tabindex="-1">Aligning things in a grid with Figma is still kinda annoyin’ too <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/building-a-ui-kit-in-figma/#aligning-things-in-a-grid-with-figma-is-still-kinda-annoyin'-too" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>One thing I always want to do is make a new grid in Figma. Whether that’s aligning a ton of icons next to each other or placing components in a grid.</p>
<p>In an ideal world I want to set the number of columns and rows and let Figma place things inside that ruleset, just like CSS Grid. And maybe that’s possible today but the current way that the grid system appears to work is that it’s kinda just outlines that you can align things next to. And <a href="https://www.figma.com/blog/introducing-smart-selection/">Smart Selection</a> is great but it’s also pretty unpredictable about where things will go when I click that button. It’s nice to quickly move items in a group like this and saves a bunch of time but I’d still like a ton of grid and alignment improvements to be made.</p>
<p>Basically the less time I have to manually move things with my mouse or trackpad, the better.</p>
<h2 id="organizing-components-is-difficult" tabindex="-1">Organizing components is difficult <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/building-a-ui-kit-in-figma/#organizing-components-is-difficult" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>This is more of a problem of time than a problem with Figma itself, as I’m still not entirely happy with the UX of large parts of our Kit. For example we have one section called “Information organizers” which is really confusing (and isn’t that what pretty much all UI does anyway – organize information?).</p>
<p>Looking at other UI Kits, they seem to struggle with this stuff too.</p>
<h2 id="the-ui-kit-is-not-our-design-system" tabindex="-1">The UI Kit is not our design system <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/building-a-ui-kit-in-figma/#the-ui-kit-is-not-our-design-system" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>There are tons of things in the front-end that can’t be reflected in our UI Kit today which I find difficult, too. Things like our CSS helpers and how components will change their styles based on the width of the viewport. And this isn’t a criticism of Figma at all by the way, it’s just a good reminder of how difficult it is to represent front-end constraints and design in something that isn’t a browser.</p>
<p>Anyway, everything I’ve mentioned here is only how we are currently do things today – all of this is likely to change the more we work with our design team and understand what they need to do their work. And I would heartily recommend checking out other UI Kits to learn about how they go about doing that stuff.</p>
<p>But it’s important to note that the components that are in our UI Kit are not a reflection of our design system. I think when people say “design system” they think of something visual – the buttons, the forms, the cards and modals. But the more I learn about design systems is it’s not about this technical or visual representation of our code. Neither is a design system a series of cool tools or a repo or a bunch of technologies combined together, as much as we might use those things in our design system work on a day to day basis.</p>
<p>A design system is a mirror, reflecting how our design team communicates with one another and how we then translate that relationship between us into front-end code. If our relationships suck then our code will suck and our users will have a sucky experience overall.</p>
<p>And so it’s important to remember that a design system is not a series of tools, but a community instead.</p>
<hr />
<p>Anyway, here’s a copy of <a href="https://www.figma.com/file/IxdCArrBNi8mVPXgCwXqwN/UI-Kit-Public?node-id=1736%3A1646">our UI Kit</a> that you can play around with!</p>
Roadside Picnic2019-03-10T23:52:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/roadside-picnic/<p>I would heartily recommend <em>Roadside Picnic</em>. It’s a sci-fi novel written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky and the book’s premise is a wonderful if not entirely ghoulish one: aliens land on Earth but leave without contacting us. In their wake they leave polluted landscapes that the government calls Zones which have been locked off for only a small batch of scientists to explore. But there’s another group called the stalkers that sneak in and steal bits of alien junk and sell it for a fortune.</p>
<p>The landscape and the objects that they’ve left behind in the Zones are peculiar though. They’re indescribably dangerous.</p>
<p>If you loved Jeff VanderMeer’s novels <em>Area X</em> or <em>Borne</em>, or if you liked the <em>Annihilation</em> movie with Natalie Portman, then it’s obvious from the very first page of this book that those things were entirely inspired by <em>Roadside Picnic</em>.</p>
<p>This novel was also the inspiration for the 1979 film <em>Stalker</em> though, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and it was notorious for its hazardous working conditions – they shot the whole film in two days downstream from a nearby chemical plant. And the crazy thing about this is film is how it shows how aliens broke our world but the film is a real recording of environmental devastation in Estonia: it was snowing in summer and poisonous white foam floated down the river during filming which was likely the cause of death for several crew members, including Tarkovsky himself.</p>
<p>Anyway, the reason why I bring this up is because although I haven’t seen the film I have one shot of it imprinted in my mind. I’ve seen this picture so many times that the movie has taken on this mythical, romantic vision in my head. It’s a photograph of a man standing in a warehouse where the cement floor has bubbled and distorted all around him:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/stalker.jpg" alt="stalker.jpg" /></p>
<p>I think this image perfectly describes the weirdness of <em>Roadside Picnic</em> where familiar things are broken or mutated in frightening ways. Next up after this is the <em>Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel</em> which I’ve also heard wonderful things about.</p>
Invisible Cities2019-03-07T22:38:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/invisible-cities/<p>I often think of this passage from Italo Calvino’s <em>Invisible Cities</em> where Marco Polo is talking to Kublai Khan about how to approach difficult problems:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.</p>
</blockquote>
The Black Triangle2019-02-23T22:51:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-black-triangle/<p>In his first week at SingleTrac, a video game company that made cult classics like Twisted Metal, Jay Barnson discovered the “<a href="http://rampantgames.com/blog/?p=7745">black triangle</a>” – a way of describing problems that are giant in engineering scope but don’t tend to be all that impressive to anyone else.</p>
<p>Jay writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It was sometime in my first week possibly my first or second day. In the main engineering room, there was a whoop and cry of success.</p>
<p>Our company financial controller and acting HR lady, Jen, came in to see what incredible things the engineers and artists had come up with. Everyone was staring at a television set hooked up to a development box for the Sony Playstation. There, on the screen, against a single-color background, was a black triangle.</p>
<p>“It’s a black triangle,” she said in an amused but sarcastic voice. One of the engine programmers tried to explain, but she shook her head and went back to her office. I could almost hear her thoughts… “We’ve got ten months to deliver two games to Sony, and they are cheering over a black triangle? THAT took them nearly a month to develop?”</p>
<p>What she later came to realize (and explain to others) was that the black triangle was a pioneer. It wasn’t just that we’d managed to get a triangle onto the screen. That could be done in about a day. It was the journey the triangle had taken to get up on the screen. It had passed through our new modeling tools, through two different intermediate converter programs, had been loaded up as a complete database, and been rendered through a fairly complex scene hierarchy, fully textured and lit (though there were no lights, so the triangle came out looking black). The black triangle demonstrated that the foundation was finally complete the core of a fairly complex system was completed, and we were now ready to put it to work doing cool stuff. By the end of the day, we had complete models on the screen, manipulating them with the controllers. Within a week, we had an environment to move the model through.</p>
<p>Afterwards, we came to refer to certain types of accomplishments as “black triangles.” These are important accomplishments that take a lot of effort to achieve, but upon completion you don’t have much to show for it only that more work can now proceed. It takes someone who really knows the guts of what you are doing to appreciate a black triangle.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I see so many parallels between this story and my work – I spend so much of my time trying to figure out the right way to build things. And I often struggle trying to build the black triangle instead of painting over an issue haphazardly.</p>
<p>Oh and thanks to <a href="https://matthewstrom.com/writing/the-design-system-you-already-have.html">Matthew Ström</a> that pointed to this story a while back.</p>
The hardest thing about design systems2019-02-23T03:41:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-hardest-thing-about-design-design-systems/<p>One of the hardest parts about design systems work is that you have to treat it all like designing a blog – the work requires tiny, incremental improvements that build up over time instead of giant reinventions of the wheel that never ship.</p>
<p>Saying “we need a good design system” – with the implication that we can start all over again – is kind of like saying “we need a better government” which...sure...but that’s such an impossibly vague and kinda useless thing to say. Instead, we should get to work improving this button, fixing this infrastructure policy, or tackling this gnarly accessibility issue with our links.</p>
<p>I see this problem everywhere in the community; dudes seem to think that design is a problem of taste rather than a problem of diligent, patient work built up over many years. There’s a large contingent of designers that believe the hard work of design systems is walking into a room and telling everyone they need more drop shadows.</p>
<p>Fuck your drop shadows.</p>
<p>Likewise I’m bored of how many folks treat design systems as this super cool and sexy work that didn’t exist a couple of years ago. An example? Yesterday I spent all day searching through a million lines of code to find how many instances of the class name “checkbox” exists. I’ve been doing “design systems” work since I was 18 and so many other front-end oriented folks have done likewise.</p>
<p>Because the only way to build a great website is with a system – we just didn’t call it that back in the day. We called it front-end architecture.</p>
<p>Anyway, I am an old man and my point is that design systems work is painfully, awfully, beautifully boring. There aren’t any sexy projects after you’ve picked the border-radius of your buttons. Each project after that will feel like an enormous hurdle because that’s the nature of the job.</p>
<p>I’m not saying this to dunk on the field – I love my career whole heartedly – but design systems requires a love of all those unsexy things. And I want to ensure that folks aren’t turned away by all the dudes with nice hair that talk about their goddamn drop shadows.</p>
<p>To all the people that love making spreadsheets and organizing their cupboards: you are sorely missed.</p>
<p>And we need you.</p>
The Design System You Already Have2019-02-23T00:55:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-design-system-you-already-have/<p>I absolutely adore this post by Matthew Ström about <a href="https://matthewstrom.com/writing/the-design-system-you-already-have.html">what design systems really are</a> and why they’re so difficult to make. Matthew writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>With beautiful design systems like Polaris, Lightning, and Carbon for inspiration, it’s tempting to open up a Sketch file and start your own. A fresh start: all the freedom in the world. Finally, a great-looking date picker.</p>
<p>But wait! You already have a design system.</p>
<p>If you look close enough at your production code, you’ll see the tell-tale signs. Your engineering friends can point out the components (what you might call molecules or atoms) and variables (design tokens). Ask the engineers how and why they wrote the code: you’ll hear many of the same concepts that designers use when creating a design system.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I love this sentiment as Matthew argues that there is a system down there, it just wasn’t designed cohesively. But that shouldn’t give us an excuse to start over again or reinvent the wheel.</p>
<p>And on this note, I think people mistake a design system for a <em>designed</em> system — which is an important distinction to make here. Just because this hodgepodge of code and design isn’t cohesively organized and you don’t like it doesn’t mean you can ignore it.</p>
<p>Regardless of how much this hurts – you must slowly improve things over time, instead of tearing everything apart.</p>
Type Choice, Political Choice2019-02-22T00:33:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/type-choice-political-choice/<p>Over on Typographica, the type designer <a href="https://agyei.design/">Agyei Archer</a> has written a wonderful piece about <a href="https://typographica.org/on-typography/type-choice-political-choice/">fascism and type design</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The quiet act of knowingly using a typeface designed by a supporter of fascism, and then vigorously defending that position, speaks to determined, privileged ignorance, and poses additional challenges to entry. It could even be enough to keep someone from wanting to fulfill their potential with type. In an environment where there are so many high-quality fonts produced every day, selecting a particular typeface becomes more and more an active choice. Typeface selection isn’t just about aesthetics, or features. It’s also about context and source — especially now. In other words, you don’t <em>have</em> to use a typeface designed by a fascist. You <em>choose</em> to.</p>
</blockquote>
Good is better than perfect2019-02-21T23:39:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/good-is-better-than-perfect/<p>I love this sentiment from Violet Peña on <a href="https://vgpena.github.io/good-is-better-than-perfect/">getting her own blog off the ground</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[...] here I am, ten months later, with a still-flawed but productive site, a site which lets me express myself, spread knowledge, and hone my writing skills. It's not perfect. But, perfections included, it's exactly right for me.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Violet writes about not liking her original website’s design and how she criticized her typographic styles until it prevented her from writing. And I guess the thing to remember here is that we should always be constantly improving our blogs, bit by bit.</p>
<p>There’s a ton of stuff on this website right here that I don’t like but I know I’ve learnt that I can fix at some point in the future – although it took me so long to learn to stop being a perfectionist on this topic. It’s vital that we remind ourselves that a blog is not a product.</p>
<p>And that’s why I don’t think we should really ever redesign our blogs. Instead we should just perpetually be designing them, building on top of them, tweaking them towards something better all the time.</p>
Amazon Chronicles2019-02-13T09:45:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/amazon-chronicles/<p><a href="https://twitter.com/tcarmody">Tim Carmody</a> happens to be one of my favorite writers and he’s just set up a newsletter over at Substack where he’s going to be writing the <a href="https://amazonchronicles.substack.com/">Amazon Chronicles</a> each week. This beat will cover everything about Amazon – from their ambitions and other-wordly weirdness to all the ways in which a single company can impact our lives.</p>
<p>Now, normally I wouldn’t recommend yet another tech thing to read but this different – Tim’s work stands above all the other tech journalism out there where I actually start to pay attention to what he has to say. His writing is always kind and sweet and interesting. In fact, it’s just the sort of writing to make me mad with jealousy because you can tell that there’s someone out there, sitting in front of their keyboard, who happens to be exceptionally smart and curious. And we’re just lucky enough to stumble upon his smarts and curiosities.</p>
<p>Take this entry where Tim interprets <a href="https://amazonchronicles.substack.com/p/interpreting-amazons-earnings">Amazon’s quarterly earnings</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I have an unusual education for a technology reporter. I didn’t study journalism in college or graduate school. I have two undergraduate degrees, one in mathematics and the other in philosophy, and a master’s degree and PhD in comparative literature. I was interested in the way media technologies shape the way people think and write. That helped prepare me for my later jobs a little bit. But what I really learned how to do in being trained as a humanist was how to work a document, how to figure out what kind of work it’s doing, what kinds of rhetorical forms it employs, what kinds of authority it appeals to, and so forth. You have to trace all the vectors that make a text do work in the world. And an earnings statement is definitely a document designed to do work in the world.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Tim goes on to breakdown what might otherwise be a painfully eye rolling subject and explains all the drama and intrigue that this subject demands. In short: I cannot recommend Tim’s newsletter highly enough and I can’t wait to see where this thing goes.</p>
<hr />
<p>P.S. If you’re currently enjoying the italics on Substack then <a href="https://twitter.com/robinrendle/status/1093587547228262401">you have me to thank for it</a> and no I am not above bragging about this. You’re welcome.</p>
The Boring Designer2019-02-13T03:15:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-boring-designer/<p>I love this post by Cap Watkins on the traits and values of <a href="http://blog.capwatkins.com/the-boring-designer">the boring designer</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The boring designer realizes that the glory isn’t in putting their personal stamp on everything they touch. In fact, most of the time, it’s about leaving no trace of themselves. The boring designer loves consistency. The boring designer loves a style guide. They love not having to worry about choosing the wrong blue or accidentally introducing a new pattern. They pick and choose the right moments to upgrade or update existing laziness-promoting tools, but are open to being persuaded not to do so (see the “Rarely stand their ground” section). If no laziness-promoting tools exist, the boring designer temporarily allows themselves to be super-exciting so they can create those tools and go back to being boring once more.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I think this is the perfect way to describe my own work. I really don’t care about making a big spectacle – I just want to make valuable things. And often that means making the interface less special, less flashy, and less memorable.</p>
<hr />
<p>“Delight” is my least favorite word when it comes to evaluating a design. I believe it relegates designers to the realm of pixel pushers and artists. Design ought to provide value, first and foremost, and not delight.</p>
<hr />
<p>One of the most incredible UIs I’ve stumbled upon lately is Apex Legends, the new free to play battle-royale FPS that’s all the rage with the teens. And the UI is brilliant because it doesn’t let anything else get in my way of the fun; it has a timer that limits other people’s character selection, it’s insanely fast loading, and removes all the junk and crap between me and playing a dang game.</p>
<p>The speed, the UI, the gameplay physics and character design all add up to something much bigger than the sum of their parts – what this game really shows us though is that great things are possible with unwavering team focus.</p>
Consensus in design systems2019-02-10T22:39:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/consensus-in-design-systems/<p>At Gusto we have a little web app called <em>The Guide</em> which contains some of our documentation for our React components, illustrations, and CSS helpers. And in its introduction I set out to inform the team of our goals in a more collaborative spirit:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This is where all of the documentation for Gusto’s design system is archived for safe keeping; it contains all the assets you need, such as images and illustrations as well as notes on our copywriting style and documentation for our React components. In fact, we like to think of The Guide as a sort of Pokédex.</p>
<p>Ideally this is where we can share information and collaborate in a public space to gain consensus across missions in terms of code, design, accessibility, performance, and branding. If we improve a single component here in The Guide then all of our apps and features will reap the rewards at the same time in a predictable manner.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Notice the phrasing there because it’s important, especially the bit about this app being a place for gaining consensus on an issue. This is the hardest part of design systems work that I don’t really hear anyone talk about because quite frankly it’s easy to make rules and documentation but it’s nigh on impossible to get a bunch of people in a room to agree about something.</p>
<p>This took me a long time to figure out, about how design systems work is much more than being the jerk that sets the rules. Also it took me a long time to figure out that design systems is basically politics. And fixing the front-end of a giant web app is also like trying to combat climate change.</p>
Gregor2019-02-06T04:46:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/gregor/<p>The second episode of Heavyweight by Gimlet called <a href="https://www.gimletmedia.com/heavyweight/2-gregor">Gregor</a> is lovely and you should listen to it immediately:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>20 years ago, Gregor lent some CDs to a musician friend. The CDs helped make him a famous rockstar. Now, Gregor would like some recognition. But mostly, he wants his CDs back.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The other day I saw that Gimlet is worth around $200 million and it made no sense to me until I listened to the first thirty seconds of this episode.</p>
A Thousand Ships2019-02-05T06:22:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/a-thousand-ships/<p>“I have a partner and I live with him,” O said abruptly on our third date as we were in bed together. She was embarrassed to say it, her eyes impossibly and tragically gray-blue (those eyes being the kind of stupid color that launches a thousand ships and breaks a million hearts, etc. etc.) Once the words were out in the open though she looked away in embarrassment, as if she felt too much and figured out precisely how the words would do their damage.</p>
<p>We had spent only a few hours together but the chemistry was impossible and overwhelming already. We were both stunned by it in fact, horrified by the quickness of our feelings. It was like fate and destiny and love aren’t just bedtime stories for children and that there really is someone out there waiting for you. Someone with stupidly beautiful eyes and a gig in data science.</p>
<p>(And someone who happens to be almost-married.)</p>
<p>My introduction to polyamory was then swift and heartbreaking and somehow...ok at the same time. Although looking back perhaps it was the distance between us that was so attractive. O is impossibly brilliant and funny and yet she’s someone I could never be fully with, never fully love, and that me made me love her even more.</p>
<p>That distance between us was the competition, not this guy she was more than halfway married to.</p>
<p>Even when she disappeared for a few weeks, a quick getaway to England for a friend’s wedding, we talked on the phone and whilst we’re laughing I hear his voice in the background. Her almost-husband is out there in the static and the hubbub of the wedding and I can tell it’s his. But oddly enough I don’t feel anger. I don’t imagine myself in his position. I don’t want his relationship with O, and I don’t resent him for it.</p>
<p>Surprisingly I feel pity when I hear his voice because I know that he’ll never have this brief moment between O and me. This one right here, the one where I’m making her laugh until she can’t control herself. And it’s there in that distance between us, and in the laughter so loud that I can’t hear anything else, that I’ve already forgotten his voice has been drowned out by all the jokes.</p>
<p>I am ruining this wedding from 5,000 miles away.</p>
<p>And I am enjoying it.</p>
Pedantry2019-02-03T19:49:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/pedantry/<p>There’s a guy that’s famous for sliding into conversations between type folks when they’re having a discussion on Twitter. He’ll always break up the party with a “well actually” no matter what the topic happens to be or who it is that happens to be speaking. Even if this chap is interrupting and correcting the foremost expert in the field he’ll always find something snarky to point out.</p>
<p>On this note, typography is often mistaken for knowing about the right fonts and remembering the names or styles of typefaces. Subsequently typography is often the pedant’s weapon of choice for making people feel dumb. And just as design is not the art of having opinions and tweeting about them, typography is not the art of dunking on people that say ‘fonts’ inside of ‘type’.</p>
<p>And I see the same thing happening in front-end development circles where there’s a collection of cool dudes that will always punch down, always fill the conversation with snark and cynicism. Their voices are loud and carry out over the vast landscape with retweets and likes.</p>
<p>This is sort of a duh obvious thing to say but Twitter incentivizes this quality of conversation somehow. If you dunk on CSS then you’ll be retweeted hundreds of times if you just include a silly gif and some half-baked snark with it.</p>
<p>I guess I’m wondering what would happen to tweets like these if statistics about retweets, likes, and followers were disabled. What would happen if you were forced to just be a person on Twitter instead of a brand ambassador for X, Y, or Z technology? I bet we wouldn’t be having these types of arguments at all because there would be no incentive to stirring the nest.</p>
<p>I’m also wondering if the community has always been like this and I’m just now discovering my own discomfort with it.</p>
<p>All these conversations are so performative that I feel weird sharing my work or thoughts on Twitter or Instagram or anywhere on the Big Web. I keep posting short missives from here and I always end up deleting them when I find my attempt at earnestness bundled between hundreds of snarky comments or end of the world tweets.</p>
<p>Sometimes I find myself writing in this way too though. I find that because I’m spending so much time in those places I’m talking down instead of talking up.</p>
The Least Harm2019-02-02T23:21:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-least-harm/<p>Frequently my work in the field of design systems isn’t about pushing an interface to the best visual fidelity or using the coolest and most crazy CSS tricks. It’s also not about building the most beautiful interface with the most delightful interactions in the world.</p>
<p>Instead – and this is something I fear a lot of folks generally don’t quite get – is that it’s often about evaluating damage to the system. Every new product and feature is a threat to the integrity of the system.</p>
<p>Good design systems work is not about consistency. Although yes the more non-reusable parts we have in our front-end, the more likelihood there is for visual regressions and bugs. It’s not about the UI though – looking at an interface is not a measure of the quality of its system.</p>
<p>Good design systems work is often about doing the least harm instead.</p>
The Argument against Centrism2019-02-01T11:08:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-argument-against-centrism/<p>History will look down upon the Republican Party for placing America in a vice, but it will blame the centrists for holding us there. In fact, there are few words in the English language that I despise more than the word ‘centrist’. ‘Content’ perhaps. Or ‘nevertheless’ just for the way it feels. ‘Moist’ maybe, at a stretch. ‘Centrist’ is a nightmare of its own though because it’s wrong for what it stands for; it’s a collection of cowardly ideas masked as moderation and wisdom.</p>
<p>Yes, centrism is a philosophy for cowards.</p>
<p>Centrists are the cowards that during the Civil War believed we could keep slavery in the south so long as the Yankees in the north just calmed down and toed the line. Centrists were the cowards that would happily live in a barbaric and violent nation during the suffragette and Civil Rights movements so long as the corner on which they stood would be a quiet one.</p>
<p>Centrists are cowards because there’s a decision we must make in America. And every generation must make it. We can either choose between intellectual treason and villainy, or we can choose to build a nation of kindness. We can build a place where we don’t have to worry about providing healthcare for our children. We can build a place without fear of poisoning the landscape or the ever present horrors of a climate in the midst of crisis.</p>
<p>We can build a place that is worthy of our patriotism. To do so we must abandon centrism and shrug off the villains and cheap thugs from the right.</p>
<p>It’s only then that we might build a nation of kindness.</p>
<hr />
<p>There’s something very special about this particular moment in time, an age in which we get to watch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez become the graceful statesfolk she has already shown us to be. When I say grace I don’t mean that lightly either, I mean the way in which she communicates, the way Alexandria is not only careful but concerned about the state of kindness in America. I wonder if this is how it felt like to listen to one of the founders, or Lincoln perhaps, when they spoke in public. That sense of progress and momentum with each and every breath.</p>
<p>We are watching a woman become President on Instagram and on Twitter. But unlike #45 who uses the worst parts of those systems to stoke hatred, Alexandria is using the very best parts of them to show us how America works under the hood. And quite frankly I cannot think of anything more inspiring than watching her talk about universal healthcare in her kitchen as she’s cooking after a long day on the hill.</p>
<p>I also cannot think of anything more kind.</p>
Arguing in Public2019-01-30T01:49:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/arguing-in-public/<p>Today was a big day. I’ve spent the last two and a half years at Gusto working on a side project that’s finally drawing to a close. It’s nothing exceptional, and it doesn’t change the world. But it makes our design system 1% better. 1% easier to maintain. 1% easier to understand.</p>
<p>If I can leave the office every day feeling as if I’ve pushed things forward, even by a slim margin, then I’m happy.</p>
<hr />
<p>I’m making our application less reliant on Bootstrap, which requires refactoring thousands of lines of CSS and breaking up each section of this mega Bootstrap Sass file by splitting it up into chunks. After today we’re one step closer to having components like <code>Button</code> or <code>Modal</code> where all the styles and scripts are in a single place.</p>
<p>We’re closer to having a designed system.</p>
<hr />
<p>I’ve been thinking a lot about why the field is so misunderstood, why so many people take the mantle of design systems work for the title more so than the actual work. I think it’s because a lot of designers tend to think it’s just about making things consistent which...<a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/design-systems-at-gusto-part-ii/">yes, but</a>...it’s so much more than that.</p>
<p>I feel as if miscommunication and disorder have to be qualities that upset you. Design systems isn’t a field you can grow into, it’s more like a field for people with specific quirks and personalities (this sounds mean perhaps but it’s true in my experience).</p>
<p>You need to be the sort of person that will do boring work in order for some very distant, greater good. You need to be capable of working on giant projects that last for months on end that have no discernible impact whatsoever.</p>
<p>There’s a certain amount of selflessness required for the work.</p>
<hr />
<p>A year ago I noticed a fight break out in our codebase. I watched as one team was pitted against another over checkboxes.</p>
<p>One team tried to fix the checkboxes that were broken in their feature, so they went into the codebase and fixed checkboxes just for this one page. This broke the checkboxes on another page in the app which the engineers on this whole other team then headed into the fray and updated their own components.</p>
<p>This went back and forth for several weeks before I realized what was happening and how these regressions were taking place. Instead of going back to the core styles and fixing them and then refactoring all checkboxes across the app to use these refactored styles, folks would instead fix their problem without investigating how complex the issue really was under the hood.</p>
<p>It was the first time I noticed that people could have an argument in a codebase. And so I realized that it’s the job of design systems folk to prevent these arguments any way that they can; through documentation, through pairing with designers and engineers, through fixing the code or the design.</p>
<p>Do you have more than one type of card in your app? That’s an argument. Do you have a billion colors and font-sizes? That’s another. Does each page have custom styles applied to it? Or do you have two components that work in a very similar way but the code is entirely different? This is perhaps the nastiest argument of them all.</p>
<p>All of these arguments are completely invisible and silent unless you have the ability to detect them properly (some have this faculty, others do not). But we also need to have the ability to describe them. To point them out. To get other people to recognize these issues. And today I’m good at detecting these issues and working around them but I’m really bad at showing others what’s causing a problem.</p>
<p>I have to fix that. Because this work isn’t just about hiding away and making the perfect design system until you unveil it to the company. A design system is not a thing you can touch or hold in your hands – it’s a culture and not a product.</p>
<p>So design systems is really about finding those arguments that hide in the codebase, or those that take refuge in a mockup, and then our job is to make them public.</p>
The Allusionist2019-01-28T03:48:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-allusionist/<p>Some friends dragged me to the Brava Theater in the Mission on Friday evening to watch a live version of <a href="https://www.theallusionist.org/">The Allusionist</a>, the podcast by Helen Zaltzman all about language. The evening was entirely perfect and I immediately felt guilty for not having listened to her podcast before. Everything about it is funny and charming and well researched. And so out of this newfound shame I decided to spend the weekend loafing about my apartment and speedrunning a whole bunch of old Allusionist episodes.</p>
<p>I particularly enjoyed <a href="https://www.theallusionist.org/allusionist/across-the-pond">Across the Pond</a>, an episode about the differences in American vs. English pronunciation and all the diversions that can sometimes be embarrassing or funny. Helen interviews Lynne Murphy, a professor of English Language and Linguistics at Sussex University, and they talk about the historical concerns that many people have on both sides. Their conversation focuses on “proper grammar” and “proper English.”</p>
<p>However, Lynn argues that there never has and never will be such a thing. Instead we should let the language mutate and fragment, we should let curiosity drive and adventure stir things up a little. Towards the end of the episode Lynn describes the matter perfectly:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>English deserves our love, but it doesn’t deserve our worry.</p>
</blockquote>
20,000 Days on Earth2019-01-26T18:45:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/days-on-earth/<p>If we’ve ever met then you already know that one my favorite films is Nick Cave’s <em><a href="https://letterboxd.com/film/20000-days-on-earth/">20,000 Days on Earth</a></em> which is part documentary and part autobiographic visual essay. Throughout the film Nick talks about his writing, his music making, how he met Kylie Minogue, and how he fell in love with his wife. His friends will appear next to him in his car like ghosts that forever haunt him and they’ll talk about performing live on stage, about their work together, and they’ll give a short interview that’s sort of haunting as they disappear without ever saying goodbye.</p>
<p>I’ve watched this film at least half a dozen times by now and with each viewing I find something else that’s mesmerizing about it. This time around I noticed Nick’s obsession with the weather; his journals describe Brighton’s storms as something unrelenting, a warning and portent of the future. In one moment, Nick looks up at the clouds as they smash into one another and lighting crackles on the horizon. “The sky in Brighton is unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” he says. “What I fear most is nature—now that it’s sent its weather to exact revenge—soon the weather will put on a real show.”</p>
<p>In another, Nick is talking about why he lives in Brighton, why he moved from Australia, and why the weather helps him write music. Nick is driving down the main thoroughfare of Brighton’s seaside, everything else is out of focus, and he says: “You know I can control the weather with my moods.”</p>
<p>“I just can’t control my moods.”</p>
<p>All of this is to say that Nick Cave writes in a way that makes me mad with jealousy. It’s last-panel-of-a-comic-book-stuff. You the know the sort, where all is lost and the double page spread ends on a note of sadness, but the hero is defiant against all the calamitous tragedies that have led up to this moment. Our hero has lost and yet he’s still smiling that big, invincible smile.</p>
The Best Debugging Story I’ve Ever Heard2019-01-25T17:28:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-best-debugging-story-ive-ever-heard/<p>I love <a href="http://patrickthomson.tumblr.com/post/2499755681/the-best-debugging-story-ive-ever-heard">this story about debugging</a> so dang much that I want a whole television series about these sorts of issues:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The technicians, despite their best efforts, could not reproduce the bug in test settings: this bug seemed only to happen in the middle of large print jobs. So, on the off chance that this was a hardware issue, they replaced everything they could - the RAM, the microcontroller, the disk drive, every conceivable part of the tape drive - but the problem kept happening.</p>
<p>So the technicians phoned up headquarters and called in The Expert.</p>
<p>The Expert got a chair and a cup of coffee and sat in the computer room – these were the days when they had rooms specifically dedicated to computers, after all – and watched it as the attendants queued up a large print job. He waited until it crashed - which it did. Everybody looked to The Expert – and he didn’t have a clue what was causing it. So he ordered that the job be queued up again, and all the attendants and technicians went back to work.</p>
<p>The Expert sat down in his chair again, waiting for it to crash. It took something like six hours of waiting, but it crashed again. He still had no idea what was causing it, other than the fact that it happened when the room was crowded. He ordered that the job be restarted, and he sat down again and waited.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This story suggests that in order to debug a system effectively we shouldn’t rush into the codebase; we should instead watch it all crash and burn. And then we should watch the system crash again. And again.</p>
<p>The only thing we can bring to the table is a little patience, a hefty dose of discipline, and an enormous bucket of coffee.</p>
The Great Divide2019-01-21T22:46:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-great-divide/<p>This post by Chris all about <a href="https://css-tricks.com/the-great-divide">the growing rift</a> in the front-end development community is worth every second of your time as not only does it reveal the arguments we’ve been having over the last couple of years but it also shows just how complicated the web has become:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Is there any solution to these problems of suffering craftsmanship and skill devaluation? Are the problems systemic and deeply rooted, or are they surface level and without severe consequence? Is the divide real, or a temporary rift? Is the friction settling down or heating up? Will the front-end developer skill set widen or narrow as the years pass?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As Chris mentions, my job title is no longer “front-end developer” but instead Font Complainer, Div Designer, or Adult Boy That Cares Too Much About Accessibility and CSS and Component Design but Doesn’t Care One Bit About GraphQL or Rails or Redux but I Feel Really Bad About Not Caring About This Other Stuff Though.</p>
<p>Joking aside, I have a ton of feelings about this subject and although Chris notes a ton of the technical changes in the industry I can’t help but feel a slight pang of cynicism as to why this divide has been created. My hot take, without any context whatsoever, is that the role of the front-end developer is not changing because of technical changes in the field. It’s something much darker than that.</p>
The Slip2019-01-17T08:07:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-slip/<p>I’m an inconsistent person. I’m in love with multiple exes at once and it bothers me. I’m not always funny, I’m not always charming. I let things slip. My weight, the way I dress. These things need constant attention and, well, I tend to lose track of things.</p>
<p>My biggest fault must be that I fall in love far too easily. All it takes is the right alignment of celestial things—a laugh, a joke, a wry smile in a dim light. And as I was thinking about this the other day I realized that I never really fall out of love with someone. These feelings of admiration drag my lapel and hoist me by the scruff of my neck until it’s 3am and I’m paralyzed by the loves I’ve, if not lost, then certainly mismanaged.</p>
<p>But somehow I feel guilty for cheating on my exes by loving them all still.</p>
<hr />
<p>No one ever told me as a kid that these sorts of relationships between people could be so impossibly complicated. I fear there’s a programmer hacking away in <code>/Users/robin.rendle</code> and that person doesn‘t seem to care the slightest about how things will work out in the future.</p>
<p>It’s like this person has root access to all my emotions and memories. And they can’t stop typing.</p>
<hr />
<p>So I find myself in love again. Although this time, as with every other, it’s different. When I fall in love I always expect the same rush but it appears to me that there are no rules and regulations that apply consistently.</p>
<p>For example this time I didn’t fall in love right away. It was the sort of thing that was drawn out over several months and then in a single conversation all that went—<em>zip, zoom, pow</em>—I find myself talking to someone that five minutes ago was just another person, but now?</p>
<p>Of course this is someone I most certainly shouldn’t be in love with.</p>
<p>But this bundle of feelings was like an exciting jolt at first. <em>Well, this is certainly new!</em> I thought in my rather Bertie Wooster sort of way (even if these feelings wouldn’t, and couldn’t ever, be reciprocated). There was this lightness I felt for the first time in months. No longer was I worrying about CSS or design or my visa. There was just this lightness at the center of things.</p>
<p>The moment when I snapped went like this: as she walks over to me she strikes up conversation but I realize that we’re talking and yet we’re not really talking. We’re doing this whole other thing. I’m pretending to be someone else and she’s playing along and all of a sudden I can’t remember the last time I had a conversation that made me feel like the one I’m having right now. Soon I find myself counting the number of times she’s laughing and I start playing a game where everything in the universe is now a prop or a setup for a joke, for her.</p>
<p>Halfway through this conversation I bump into some kind of metaphysical boundary that looms out in all directions. <em>Aw beans</em>, I thought (rather poetically). I’m in love now I guess?</p>
<p>I have so many questions though! Is this all it takes for me? A few giggles and a private joke?</p>
<p>A couple of days zip by and she walks over to my desk again. Of course I stop coding and all my attention is on her because quite frankly everything else can go straight to hell. This job, my visa, my apartment, my motorcycle—I find that whenever I’m around her I enjoy being myself—I also find that I’m counting each laugh again but this time categorizing them in my mind. Okay, so she laughed at thing 1 and thing 2 but not thing 3. <em>Logging that for later.</em> What makes her smile? How does she see the world? What excites her and frightens her and what does she want next from life?</p>
<p>In giant, grotesque letters behind me I imagine a flashing neon sign:</p>
<p><em>Aw, beans.</em></p>
<p>As the conversation comes to a close though I become the physical manifestation of a Shania Twain lyric; I want this feeling and this moment—this dumb conversation we’re having right now—to last forever.</p>
<hr />
<p>“Every conversation for you is a performance isn’t it?” my ex replied and looked up from her drink.</p>
<p>I had just told her about the laugh-counting thing I do in my head sometimes. Like when I’m bored in meetings or conversations, but especially on dates, I tend to kick off a stand-up routine where I bounce jokes off the other person until they laugh, or until they despise me.</p>
<p>“Yes,” I replied after a short pause. “Everything I do is an act, in one way or another.” And I smiled back, pretending that I wasn’t still madly in love with her.</p>
The Sisters Brothers2019-01-14T06:42:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-sisters-brothers/<p>I can’t remember the last time a book felt like this. It’s the sort of book that makes you want to quit your job and set up camp in bed for the day solely in order to get to the next scene, the next page, to discover what happens next.</p>
<p>Well, <em>The Sisters Brothers</em> is certainly a book of that type for me. It’s a novel about two outlaws that travel to San Francisco from Oregon in order to kill a man and along the way they murder, steal, and plunder the landscape for all it’s worth. But there’s something dazzling and warm about it all despite the grief and violence of the plot.</p>
<p>(I would recommend this book in a heart beat.)</p>
<p>But when the two outlaw brothers find themselves in California though, they immediately talk about the atmosphere of the place and it reminds me so much of how I felt when I first moved here:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Charlie called over to say he was impressed with California, that there was something in the air, a fortuitous energy, was the phrase he used. I did not feel this but understood what he meant. It was the thought that something as scenic as this running water might offer you not only aesthetic solace but also golden riches; the thought that the earth itself was taking care of you, was in favor of you. This perhaps was what lay at the very root of the hysteria surrounding what came to be known as the Gold Rush: Man desiring a feeling of fortune; the unlucky masses hoping to skin or borrow the luck of others, or the luck of a destination. A seductive notion, and one I thought to be wary of. To me, luck was something you either earned or invented through strength of character. You have to come by it honestly; you could not trick or bluff your way into it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s been almost three years now since I moved to San Francisco and so my memory of those first few weeks in the city are hazy. One of the earliest memories I have left is this: I’m standing in Jules's kitchen after cooking us dinner. I’ve finished cleaning up yet I’m rooted to the spot as I stand by the sink and look out the window. Jules is in the other room laughing hysterically and I want to join her but I’m starstruck by the light outside. It’s a summer’s evening and that rare feeling has bubbled to the surface again.</p>
<p>It’s a long sunset, so long that it feels like I’m always going to be standing in my girlfriend’s kitchen, listening to her explosive laughter in the other room, and I’ll always be watching how this golden light is sweeping through the trees outside, and how it’s sliding across this kitchen countertop to shake my hand. I can’t stop feeling as if this light is happy to see me, as if it barreled it’s way here, across half a solar system of infinite nothingness, just to make me smile.</p>
<p>And so I understand what the murdering scumbag Charlie Sisters felt on his fictional trek to California; this place is in favor of me.</p>
Writing software together2019-01-12T23:22:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/writing-software-together/<p>I like this post by Georgy Marchuk on <a href="https://css-tricks.com/a-minimal-javascript-setup/">a minimal JavaScript setup</a> but I especially like this bit where Georgy describes the difficulty of writing software as a group:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The success of a development team starts with an agreement. An agreement of how things are done. Without an agreement, code would get messy, and the software unsustainable quite quickly, even for relatively small projects. Therefore, a lot (if not most) of the power of a framework lies within this agreement. The ability to define conventions and common patterns that everyone adheres to. That idea is applicable to any framework, JavaScript or not. Those "rules" are essential to development and bring teams maintainability at any size, reusability of code, and the ability to share work with a community in a form anyone will understand.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I think this comment is what I was half-remembering the other day when I wrote that “<a href="https://buttondown.email/robinrendle/archive/513a2f17-6d8b-4cfb-a5d5-0ac009a65e3f">every interface is an argument</a>.” You can see it in the design of an interface—how an organization works and how much people inside that org disagree with one another.</p>
<p>Are there inconsistencies in the position of elements? In the typesetting? In the colors that they use? Are certain parts of an app better than others? Does this app have poor performance when you scroll, when you click, or when you load something?</p>
<p>The important thing to note is that these issues are rarely due to incompetence—there can be hundreds of wonderfully talented people working at a company and the thing that they make together might still have these flaws. Rather than incompetence, these issues reveal serious communication flaws in an organization. And so our job as design systems folk isn’t necessarily to fix those bugs with the design or code as much as it is to tackle the very issues that caused them; miscommunication en masse.</p>
Women and Power2019-01-07T00:46:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/women-and-power/<p>I adore Mary Beard’s latest book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Women-Power-Manifesto-Mary-Beard/dp/1631494759"><em>Women and Power</em></a>. It’s a slim volume but that makes it the perfect size for Mary to keep you gripped to the edge of your seat as she compares sexism in modernity to that of the ancients. In one glorious passage she writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have to be more reflective about what power is, what it is for, and how it is measured. To put it another way, if women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power, surely it is power that we need to redefine rather than women?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If you’re unfamiliar with Mary’s work then you might like to check out <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LL_acQHNs-o">her delightful documentary series about ancient Rome</a> first. This is only because I think Mary Beard is to the ancient world as David Attenborough is to the natural one; a truly delightful story teller.</p>
Christmas in LA2019-01-01T23:44:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/christmas-in-la/<p>We’re not in Los Angeles, Ali reminds me for maybe the fiftieth time as she unlocks her phone and points to the map. “This bit is Orange County, this bit is LA.” She’s mad and tells me I’m an idiot yet somehow it’s a mark of respect, a mark of true friendship even, that she calls me out for being lazy.</p>
<p>“I dunk because I love,” she says.</p>
<p>It’s Christmas Day. I’m staying at her family home for the next couple of days and we’ve gone for a walk but now we’re sitting on a bench overlooking LA in the dark – I mean Orange County – I mean wherever the heck we are.</p>
<p>The entire region around LA and Orange County is always going to be <em>MegaCity One</em> in my head; an enormous landscape filled to the brim and stretching out to infinity. In fact, my mind still reels a little bit when I think of the urban sprawl and now we can see it before us here—pinpricks of light hover out in the darkness like a swarm of tiny UFOs.</p>
<p>But out of nowhere, and for no particular reason, I start crying big blubbery tears. Ali’s talking about herself for the first time in a while and I’m starstruck by how kind and earnest she is all of a sudden; Ali is the sort of friend that makes you a much better and more thoughtful person just by spending time with her.</p>
<p>Maybe I’m crying because this is the first time I’ve spent Christmas away from my family and outside the UK. Although no, that can’t be it—I wouldn’t have wanted to spend it anywhere else. Or maybe it’s because friendship like this is still an unfamiliar concept to me. Maybe it’s because my visa is running out and my anxiety has become slightly overwhelming as I think about how little control I have over the next twelve months of my life. Although maybe it’s just because I’ve spent nine hours on my motorcycle driving down here from San Francisco and I’m exhausted.</p>
<p>As we stand to leave I manage to hide my dumb tears from her in the dark. She would definitely call me an idiot if she saw me crying.</p>
<p>On Boxing Day we drive over to Huntington Beach and it’s almost empty besides us and a few cyclists riding up and down the boardwalk. We watch the sunset and I make a bad joke about how the sunsets in England are <em>way</em> better than this.</p>
<figure class="m-wrapper--full">
<img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/IMG_0199.jpg" alt="Huntington Beach" />
</figure>
<p>But I’m lying. This is the most beautiful sunset I’ve ever seen.</p>
Hate Inc. and the Serial Book2018-12-28T20:43:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/hate-inc/<p>The other day I was reading Craig Mod’s article all about the <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/future-book-is-here-but-not-what-we-expected/">Future Book</a> where he briefly mentioned Matt Taibbi’s latest venture: <a href="hatehttps://taibbi.substack.com">Hate, Inc</a>. This is a newsletter published via <a href="https://www.substack.com/">Substack</a> (that charges $40 for a yearly subscription) but the exciting thing about this is that Matt is publishing whole <em>books</em> via these newsletters, breaking his stories down into chapters along the way.</p>
<p>I hadn’t heard of Matt’s newsletter until Craig recommended it, but he’s one of my favorite writers and I’ve <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/an-archipeligo-man/">waxed lyrical</a> about some of his previous work.</p>
<p>Anyway, over the holidays I’ve been obsessively reading the first book that he published via his newsletter which is a mostly fictional account of drug dealer Huey Carmichael—so many scenes in this story have kept me on the edge of my seat that it’s difficult to point to one of them though.</p>
<p>Supposedly the story is based on the real account of a dealer and the register and tone of each chapter is entirely believable. This fictitious dealer, Huey, writes about the difficulties and hardships of moving drugs around the country but it’s this feeling I get whilst reading it that there’s this whole economy under my feet that I’m entirely ignorant of. Like in this part where Matt, as Huey, writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You’ve seen <em>Training Day</em>, where Scott Glenn has his “pension” buried under his house? There’s some truth to that shit. Even the best growers aren’t always sophisticated. They’ll make money, wrap it, and bury it. From time to time they’ll open it up so it doesn’t get moldy, or even just to look at it. Then they just re-wrap it.</p>
<p>Up and down the coast of California, man, I guarantee you there’s half a billion dollars buried up there.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I also love that Taibbi calls these ventures “serial books.” And I <a href="https://twitter.com/robinrendle/status/1076292754840334336">mentioned</a> this the other day but I think that work like Taibbi’s proves that email is the most exciting publishing platform there is right now.</p>
You Need a Budget2018-12-21T03:29:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/ynab/<p>For the past couple of days I’ve been using <a href="https://www.youneedabudget.com/">You Need A Budget</a>, a web app that’s designed around a rather simple premise: every dollar you earn should have a job, whether that’s paying for dumb stuff like video games, or paying off student debt, or buying coffee or food.</p>
<p>That simple premise makes an enormous difference to me though.</p>
<p>With a quick scan I can finally see where my money is going over the next couple of months without it feeling like a stress-induced nightmare. Each bucket or category gives me an idea of whether I’m paying off my debts or whether I’m going out too much. And I know this sounds silly but that simple act of giving every dollar a job suddenly changes my whole relationship with money. Because of that I’ve already held off on buying things that I might otherwise have thought <em>screw it, this is just a few bucks, why not?</em></p>
<p>Not only that but I love the way that the folks over at YNAB write. Their emails give you advice about finance stuff and how to use the app but unlike almost every other bit of marketing copy out there it’s always insightful and interesting to read. There’s no junk at all and that always makes me respect a company if the writing isn’t riddled with sound bites or catch phrases.</p>
<p>Thanks to <a href="https://twitter.com/kellysutton?lang=en">Kelly Sutton</a> for the constant stream of recommendations that finally led to me checking out YNAB. I would highly recommend that you <a href="https://youneedabudget.com/">sign up</a>, too.</p>
Switchin’ to Firefox2018-12-17T04:32:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/switchin-to-firefox/<p>After reading a few posts about <a href="https://css-tricks.com/browser-diversity-commentary-regarding-the-edge-news/">browser diversity</a> I realized that I need to put my money where my mouth is and make the switch to Firefox. And so, despite my initial hesitation, that’s what I did last week and actually I’m loving everything so far. There’s a few things about the DevTools that are in fact a big improvement over Chrome, at least for the type of development I’m doing. And that’s without mentioning the security aspect of things.</p>
<p>The switch was in part inspired by what <a href="https://andy-bell.design/wrote/browser-diversity/">Andy had to say about browsers</a> recently:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’ll say it bluntly: we must support Firefox. We can’t, as a community allow this browser engine monopoly. We must use Firefox as our main dev browsers; we must encourage our friends and families to use it, too.</p>
<p>Yes, it’s not perfect, nor are Mozilla, but we can help them to develop and grow by using Firefox and reporting issues that we find. If we just use and build for Chromium, which is looking likely (cough Internet Explorer monopoly cough), then Firefox will fall away and we will then have just one major engine left. I don’t ever want to see that.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And the switch was especially inspired by what Jeremy wrote just the other day too:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There’s just no sugar-coating this. I’m sure the decision makes sound business sense for Microsoft, but it’s not good for the health of the web.</p>
<p>Very soon, the vast majority of browsers will have an engine that’s either Blink or its cousin, WebKit. That may seem like good news for developers when it comes to testing, but trust me, it’s a sucky situation of innovation and agreement. Instead of a diverse browser ecosystem, we’re going to end up with incest and inbreeding.</p>
<p>There’s one shining exception though. <a href="https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/">Firefox.</a> That browser was originally created to combat the seemingly unstoppable monopolistic power of Internet Explorer. Now that Microsoft are no longer in the rendering engine game, Firefox is once again the only thing standing in the way of a complete monopoly.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If you care about the health of the web then you owe it to yourself to explore Firefox and make the jump away from Chromium. We need a diverse web with as many browser engines as we can get.</p>
Potential and Loss2018-12-13T18:13:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/potential-and-loss/<p>What troubles me most about Brexit, despite that abomination of a name, is the wasted intellectual, emotional, and creative resources that have been spent on it so far. Two years of doubt, anxiety, and arguments. For nothing.</p>
<p>I sometimes imagine all the problems we could be solving as a nation; fighting climate change, transitioning our society and culture away from burning fossil fuels, improving public transport or public services and figuring out how best to improve the NHS. But no. All that time and energy has instead been spent on trying to barter with Europe for the things we already have. It’s such a waste.</p>
<hr />
<p>People compare #45 and Brexit all the time but there’s an important distinction I try to make when people ask me about it.</p>
<p>With #45 I sometimes feel this pang of unexpected optimism. The worst person for the job was elected and yet the Republic stands. Things are terrible, yes. But there’s something about the design of this nation that I can’t help but feel proud of a little bit. If there’s a mad king at the top and the nation doesn’t descend into madness immediately then I think there’s resilience in the design of it all.</p>
<p>Perhaps this is a bit simplistic but in two years #45 is gone and yet Brexit is going to loom like a dark shadow over my home country for a generation. In March of next year we could see Scotland and Northern Ireland break away from England if they want to join the EU. And perhaps that’s a good thing. I don’t know.</p>
<hr />
<p>It’s not the most important thing in the world but after March I’ll need a visa to travel across Europe again. I won’t be able to leave and move to Berlin or Paris and that’s heart-breaking to me; the loss of potential connections, potential threads, relationships.</p>
<p>I think about that a lot, the loss of potential.</p>
<hr />
<p>Whenever I hear pro-Brexit arguments it’s always a pitiful refrain along the lines of <a href="https://youtu.be/uvPbj9NX0zc">what did they do for us</a>? The question is a sheepish one, masked in a veneer of national pride and economic anxiety. Besides what people say, <a href="https://youtu.be/Ek9_GQa1lgc">Brexit is not about economic anxiety or anger</a> about increasing political ties with Europe. There are a lot of reasons why Brexit happened; the civil war in Syria and the implosion of Greece, the infighting in the Conservative party, the weakness of Cameron and the lies of tabloid journalists that work for the Daily Mail and the Sun — but all that doesn’t hide our vibrant racism, xenophobia, and cowardice.</p>
<p>When I hear that foolish question though – “what did Europe ever do for us” – I quite frankly want to scream. What did Europe do for us? The Internet you damn fools, the Internet! The single greatest economic and technological breakthrough since the telegram! Sir Tim Berners Lee designed the proto-web at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN">CERN</a>; our culture and civilization are the benefactors of a wondrous European project.</p>
<p>What is Europe for then? It’s about building projects together that we couldn’t as a small nation stranded off the coast of France. It’s for combating the encroachment of Chinese, Russian and American influence on the world economy and political stage. It’s about standing together as a larger force to be reckoned with and respected.</p>
<p>The European project was always about kindness, prosperity in all forms, and creating a small region of the world where borders between nations are mostly bureaucratic rather than real, physical barriers that block us out. Barriers that limit our potential.</p>
<p>As far as I understand Europe was designed to prevent another world war by binding us all together. Instead of breaking off into weak, pitiful tribes, Europe’s vision was always to make us the same people.</p>
<p>And we failed that utopian vision by succumbing to the meanest, worst versions of ourselves.</p>
<hr />
<p>I look at the past two years and I blush with shame. What fools we’ve all been to waste such potential.</p>
Searching the Creative Internet2018-12-13T17:45:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/searching-the-creative-internet/<p>David Crawshaw has a wondrous idea for <a href="https://crawshaw.io/blog/searching-the-creative-internet">a new type of search engine</a> that doesn’t scan the commerical web and instead indexes indie blogs, podcasts, and art instead:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What I miss is that I could "go on the internet" and be in a creative corner of the human experience. Today if you "go on the internet", that means you pulled your phone out of your pocket, dismissed some notification spam and start reading click-bait shared by people you have met on social media.</p>
<p>Today you have to choke your way through the money-making miasma to find the joy.</p>
<p>[...] What is clear to me is that it is time for separate tools. A search engine designed to be used by billions of people every day to do daily tasks is not one that will be appropriate for weekend meanderings though obscure topics. A content-sharing site like Reddit that encourages links to the New York Times will not generate thoughtful discussion.</p>
<p>What is not clear to me yet is how those tools should work. How do we build a search engine that penalizes media outlets and promotes blogs and podcasts? How do we distinguish between a research paper or an article written by someone about their daily life aboard ISS on <a href="http://nasa.gov/">nasa.gov</a> from their useless press releases?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There’s a feeling of being extremely online where you suddenly trip onto a blog like David’s — I always get thoroughly excited about someone making something because they care, rather than if they’re just trying to make a quick buck.</p>
<p>But these days I rarely feel that way — I don’t surf the web in the way that I used to and I tend to box myself inside giant, boring corporate structures instead. I’m no longer diving into weird forums or reading a strange blog about pigeons or something anymore.</p>
<p>And I feel like David’s search engine could fix that.</p>
On the web not of the web2018-12-09T17:41:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/on-the-web-not-of-the-web/<p>I really like how Andy Baio describes Quora’s practices as “isolationist” in this post about <a href="https://waxy.org/2018/12/why-you-should-never-ever-use-quora/">why you should never use their service</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All of Quora’s value is derived from the answers provided by its users, and they go to great lengths to make a well-designed platform for finding and replying to questions.</p>
<p>But they do everything they can to make sure you can’t get those contributions back out.</p>
<p>[...] When Quora shuts down, and it will eventually shut down one day, all of that collected knowledge will be lost unless they change their isolationist ethos.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’ve never used Quora and I feel like the issues that Andy outlines is why. The same thing applies to Pinterest as well — although I’m not sure about their API or content policies — whenever I’ve stumbled into Pinterest I feel like it’s a service on the web, but not of the web.</p>
Goodbye, EdgeHTML2018-12-08T21:25:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/goodbye-edgehtml/<p>Chris Beard has written about all <a href="https://twitter.com/robinrendle/status/1070111363563872256">the drama</a> surrounding Microsoft killing off EdgeHTML and he makes <a href="https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/12/06/goodbye-edge/">a lot of great points</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Will Microsoft’s decision make it harder for Firefox to prosper? It could. Making Google more powerful is risky on many fronts. And a big part of the answer depends on what the web developers and businesses who create services and websites do. If one product like Chromium has enough market share, then it becomes easier for web developers and businesses to decide not to worry if their services and sites work with anything other than Chromium. That’s what happened when Microsoft had a monopoly on browsers in the early 2000s before Firefox was released. And it could happen again.</p>
<p>If you care about what’s happening with online life today, take another look at Firefox.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I also really like <a href="https://daverupert.com/2018/12/edge-goes-chromium/">Dave Rupert’s take</a> on this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Is Firefox in my future? Not sure. But if the idea of a Google-driven Web is of concern to you, then I’d encourage you to use Firefox. And don’t be a passive consumer; blog, tweet, and speak about its killer features. I’ll start: Firefox’s CSS Grid, Flexbox, and Variable Font tools are the best in the business. And <a href="https://color.firefox.com/">Firefox Color</a> is the best thing to happen to browser theming in a decade (my Firefox currently looks like Saved by the Bell). There’s a bigger world beyond Chromium, I encourage you to explore it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>After thinking about it for a couple of days, <a href="https://twitter.com/robinrendle/status/1071188169809264640">my take</a> on all this news is a little different and a lot less practical:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>tired: looking at all the hubbub about browsers and finally downloading Firefox</p>
<p>wired: realizing that Google should be broken up by the federal govt. because no way in heck should a single company own maps, email, search, and browsers</p>
</blockquote>
Design Systems is Easy2018-12-07T21:25:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/design-systems-is-easy/<p>I love <a href="https://youtu.be/Y16QDYpj8uI">this talk</a> by <a href="http://mina.codes/">Mina Markham</a> all about her work on designing systems at Slack and Hillary for America. What I particularly love about this talk though is that Mina digs into what she screwed up along the way and how she fixed it. My reaction to her talk is probably because I tend to see far too much bragging and hubris in the field of design systems and so it’s wonderful to find someone who is revered in the industry say stuff like this that isn’t just “I’m great, huh.”</p>
<p>I’m not sure what it is about the job of ‘design systems’ but it seems like it’s an excuse to be an asshole and to pretend as if you’ve never made a mistake before. Mina’s vulnerable talk makes me hopeful that this current trend can be broken.</p>
<p>Speaking of which, a while back I had an idea for a talk where I would stand in front of some slides and brag for a whole hour about how great I am at solving design systems problems whilst behind me apocalyptic slides would zoom in and out of view. I think it would be sort of funny and would parody a lot of the designers that I see talk a big game.</p>
<p>Here’s the title card I designed for it:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/design-systems-is-easy.001.jpeg" alt="design-systems-is-easy.001.jpeg" /></p>
The Victorian Internet2018-12-05T05:24:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-victorian-internet/<p>In <em>The Victorian Internet</em> Tom Standage investigates how the telegraph was developed and how it changed the world. He writes about the laying of the Transatlantic submarine cables, the design of codes and the codebreakers, as well as the fraudsters that used the telegraph to find their marks, and those that used it to find the person they’d marry.</p>
<p>There’s so many exciting moments in this book that it’s difficult to contain my excitement. For example, Standage notes how the technology was ignored for many painful years and yet there was this moment in time when the idea clicked and the telegraph began to spread across the world:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Expansion was the fastest in the United States, where the only working line at the beginning of 1846 was Morse’s experimental line, which ran 40 miles between Washington and Baltimore. Two years later there were approximately 2,000 miles of wire, and by 1850 there were over 12,000 miles operated by twenty different companies.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/IMG_5956.jpg" alt="IMG_5956.jpg" /></p>
<p>As I was reading Tom’s book it dawned on me that the Internet that we’re using today is really just an extension of the Internet that Morse built; we’re using the same wires (although the system has been improved many times over). The telephone is an extension of the telegraph and the Internet is an extension of the telephone. They’re three different platforms for navigating the same network of machines and people.</p>
<p>And with all the talk of the cloud and with the modern convenience of Wifi it’s easy to forget that the Internet is a collection of wires at its heart, buried deep. You can even <a href="https://www.submarinecablemap.com/">see the wires</a> that connect San Francisco to Libya, and Libya to Malaysia. In fact, Standage quotes an event that was held in Morse’s honor where one commentator argued that “the breadth of the Atlantic, with all its waves, is as nothing.”</p>
<p>The night I finished <em>The Victorian Internet</em> I called my father who happens to live in England more than 5,000 miles away. We talked about motorcycles, work, anxiety, and our hopes for the future. But it was as if we were in the same room together.</p>
<p>During this conversation I thought about the generations who have built this system of cables and technologies so that those 5,000 miles between my father and me were like nothing at all. I imagined all the wires and satellites between us, carrying our messages diligently, effortlessly across the world.</p>
<p>In an article from 1881 Standage quotes the <em>Scientific American</em> and how “the touch of the telegraph key welded human sympathy and made possible its manifestation in a common universal, simultaneous heart throb.”</p>
<p>And I couldn’t help but cry big dumb tears after we’d finished talking and my father hung up. What a wondrous thing this all is, I thought. My grandfather’s father knew a world without electricity and yet here I am communing with his great grandson in a form that could not be described in any other way besides ‘magic.’</p>
Front-end development is not a problem to be solved2018-11-28T01:30:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/front-end-development-is-not-a-problem-to-be-solved/<p>Today we published something over on CSS-Tricks that I’ve been thinking about over the past year or so. A lot of folks tend to think that front-end development is a problem to be solved with tools, processes, or frameworks. <a href="https://css-tricks.com/front-end-development-is-not-a-problem-to-be-solved/">And I disagree</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I reckon HTML and CSS deserve better than to be processed, compiled, and spat out into the browser, whether that’s through some build process, app export, or gigantic framework library of stuff that we half understand. HTML and CSS are two languages that deserve our care and attention to detail. Writing them is a skill.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>We all want accessible interfaces where every browser can access our work, with beautiful mobile interactions, instantaneous performance, and a design system where someone can click-clack components together in no time. But all of those things are only possible if we care about the field of front-end development and see it as a worthy career.</p>
<p>Unlike traditional programming languages, it seems to me that many folks in web development don’t want to learn how CSS or HTML works because they feel like it will soon go away. And in this post I finally managed to put it into words although I’ve been trying to <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/i-dont-believe-in-full-stack-engineering/">again</a> and <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/design-systems-at-gusto-part-ii/">again</a> over the last year.</p>
<p>Also, the comments that folks have added to this piece are super interesting.</p>
Cool Gray City of Type2018-11-23T06:44:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/cool-gray-city-of-type/<p>I’m reading Gary Kamiya’s <em>Cool Gray City of Love</em> at the moment which is an account of the history of San Francisco and it’s architecture, culture, and people. If you’re interested in the history of San Francisco then I’d certainly recommend it. But this week Gary’s book reminded me of an idea I can’t shake for a book of my own.</p>
<p>This idea has been floating about in my head for about two years and it struck me the first moment I laid eyes on San Francisco on an overcast day in December. The city has a peculiar typographic history and a high concentration of people that care intensely about letterforms. It’s tough to see at first but once you do you begin to see wonderful letters everywhere.</p>
<p>So whilst Gary’s book traces the city of San Francisco through its geography, mine would trace the city through typography and lettering.</p>
<p>There’s the <a href="https://letterformarchive.org/">Letterform Archive</a> and Silicon Valley's contribution to typesetting, there’s the <a href="https://sfcb.org/">Center for the Book</a>, <a href="https://www.typethursday.org/san-francisco/">Type Thursday </a> and, of course, <a href="https://www.newbohemiasigns.com/about/">New Bohemia Signs</a> to talk about. There’s desktop publishing and neon lights, the fallow tech industry and it’s lazy branding efforts, there’s the indie type designers, and the video game industry.</p>
<p>The book would be a rambling, unfocused, and joyous little thing.</p>
<p>Speaking of which, last week I foolishly took a walk through all the smoke and headed over to the Mission where I stumbled upon this lovely garage door, designed by a fellow from New Bohemia Signs:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/geagaeaega.jpg" alt="geagaeaega.jpg" /></p>
<p>Glorious stuff, huh? Anyway – San Francisco is teeming with typographic artifacts, institutions, and people that make stuff like this. But I feel like the city isn’t well known for typography or lettering and so convincing folks to look at the city through that lens could make for a wonderful book.</p>
<p>The text would be a mix between the slow, patient waddling of <a href="http://robinrendle.com/essays/futures-of-typography">The Futures of Typography</a> with the upbeat childish whimsy that I hope for in <a href="http://robinrendle.com/adventures">Adventures</a>. It would be more researched and elaborate though and I’d pick an illustrator to help capture that sense of glamour and wonder that I see in the city. On that front, I think <a href="https://dribbble.com/itsAnnaHurley">Anna’s work</a> or <a href="https://dribbble.com/camellianeri">Camellia’s</a> would give the thing an extra pop and giggle.</p>
<p>This book would probably follow me through interviews and trips across the Bay Area where I’d try to figure out what makes San Francisco special in this regard and what we can all learn from this peculiar place.</p>
<p>And I think that’s what Adventures and this old blog of mine has always been really; it’s an excuse to, in a rather roundabout sort of way, slowly write a book.</p>
Why can’t we use functional and regular CSS at the same time?2018-11-20T06:41:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/why-cant-we-use-functional-css-and-regular-css-at-the-same-time/<p>Over on CSS-Tricks I’ve written a bit about <a href="https://css-tricks.com/why-cant-we-use-functional-css-and-regular-css-at-the-same-time/">how we write CSS today at Gusto</a> and how I’ve been thinking about the whole “functional vs. regular CSS” debate. I apologize profusely in advance for all the nuance because here’s the thing: I think using both systems is actually what we need to write maintainable CSS.</p>
<p>I break down the problem of writing CSS into three neat chunks:</p>
<ol>
<li>Readability</li>
<li>Managing dependencies</li>
<li>Avoiding the painful fact that visual design doesn’t like math</li>
</ol>
<p>Here’s a bit more about that last point that I don’t hear enough discussions about:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A lot of visual design requires imperfect numbers that don’t properly scale. With a functional CSS system, you’ll probably want a system of base 10, or base 8, where each value is based on that scale. But when you’re aligning items together visually, you may need to do so in a way that it won’t align to those values. This is called optical adjustment and it’s because our brains are, well, super weird. What makes sense mathematically often doesn’t visually. So, in this case, we'd need to add more bottom padding to the button to make the text feel like it’s positioned in the center. With a functional CSS approach it’s harder to do stuff like that neatly, at least in my experience.</p>
<p>In those cases where you need to balance readability, dependencies, and optical adjustments, writing regular CSS in a regular old-fashioned stylesheet is still my favorite thing in the world. But functional CSS still solves a ton of other problems very eloquently.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I have a ton of other stuff to write about on this subject of writing CSS at scale but I think this post is a good summary of what I’ve learned over the last two years or so.</p>
The Red Hand Files2018-11-20T06:17:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-red-hand-files/<p>Nick Cave’s newsletter is called <a href="https://www.theredhandfiles.com/">The Red Hand Files</a> – he typically answers questions from his fans in an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advice_column">agony aunt fashion</a> – and in one of the more recent entries he writes about recovering from tragedy:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>So how do we return to our lives – to the awe of existence – and reclaim a sense of wonder? Well, for me, it had something to do with work but it also had something to do with community. Work and community. I kind of realised that work was the key to get back to my life, but I also realised that I was not alone in my grief and that many of you were, in one way or another, suffering your own sorrows, your own griefs. I felt this in our live performances. I felt very acutely that a sense of suffering was the connective tissue that held us all together. It was these two things – community and work – that showed Susie and me a way forward. Work became the lifelines thrown out to us as we floated lost in narcissism and self-absorption. It also became very clear to both of us that we were not alone! We could see there were many others out there, floating around in the dark, outside of their lives. It seemed to be everywhere we looked – people in search of meaning and wonder.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I adore this sentiment but for me that sense of community manifests itself in writing and reading on the web. Knowing for example that every day <a href="https://bitsofco.de/learning-to-write-again/">Ire is writing about her work</a>, <a href="https://email-is-good.com/">Chris is thinking about email</a>, and <a href="https://cushionapp.com/journal">Jonnie is figuring out his business</a>, well, that’s all just endlessly inspiring to me.</p>
<p>And I get the sense when I read these things that we’re all just bumping into each other in the dark.</p>
Summerland2018-11-09T18:52:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/summerland/<p>Hannu Rajaniemi has made something marvelous; his latest novel <em>Summerland</em> is the best spy thriller I’ve read in years. The story is set in the early 20th century and in an alternative timeline where the British discovered the afterlife and began to colonize it. Queen Victoria’s spirit still rules over England, even after she died, and she now barks orders from her palace in The Summer City – a fortification that British adventurers discovered after they had passed over.</p>
<p>Anyway, the novel is set in the 1930s where the British Empire is in a cold war with Russia. Lenin’s spirit, known only as The Presence, continues to rule the land and has consumed millions of souls. Stalin on the other hand is hanging out in Spain trying to start a civil war in order to destroy the British, the Russians, The Presence, and the Summer City because he wants death to have meaning once again.</p>
<p>Read that last sentence once more because holy yikes this is a weird book and that’s just the précis. In short, I would highly recommend this novel because of how strange and peculiar the story is. I couldn’t put this thing down once I started.</p>
What do you want to do when you grow up, kid?2018-11-02T04:52:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/what-do-you-want-to-do-when-you-grow-up-kid/<p>I fell into web design via books. When I was maybe six or seven I remember reading about polar bears and how they hibernated in a large compendium about all sorts of natural habitats and curiosities ranging from foxes hunting in the desert and wild horses running on the Mongolian plains to Emperor penguins shivering in the Antarctic. And to this day I still remember that giant, double page spread of a bear and her cubs. It was a wondrous illustration but what piqued my curiosity was how the writer described hibernation.</p>
<p>They called it “time travel for bears.”</p>
<p>In a flash I realized that the illustrations and the text are the same thing, that they’re two sides of the same coin. And I felt like I had stumbled upon a treasure trove of hidden secrets: I noticed the book as an object, <a href="https://robinrendle.com/essays/call-me-interactivity/">the shape of the text</a> inside it, and the colors and the texture, the merging of syntax and voice, too. They all swirled around into a delicious, potent mix.</p>
<p>At that very moment I knew that’s what I wanted to do. As a child of six or seven I knew the answer to the question that had plagued me for what felt like an eternity; what do you want to do when you grow up, kid?</p>
<p><em>This!</em> I wanted to point at the polar bears and hurl the text up into the faces of all those nosey adults. <em>I want this.</em></p>
<p>The reason why I got into front-end development and web design is because of this book about polar bears and it’s why I’m so fascinated in publishing today. I believe I’m a web designer for the same reason that Gutenberg invented his maniacal contraptions half a millennia ago <a href="https://robinrendle.com/essays/futures-of-typography/">in the German town of Mainz</a>; locking type together, hacking away at <a href="https://robinrendle.com/essays/bookmarking/">bits of text</a> in a dark room, and then – blamo! – you print all the paper, you bind all the books, you hit the big green button, and it’s published.</p>
<p>Sure, <a href="https://robinrendle.com/essays/new-web-typography/">web design is different</a> but that impossibly dumb and electric feeling of publishing something on the web is why I do what I do. Not for the claps or the high-fives or in search of faint praise—but something else entirely.</p>
<hr />
<p>I was terrified the first day I walked into Gusto, the company I work for today. I was being interviewed more than 5,000 miles from my hometown in England for starters. But as I was walking through the office, palms sweaty and knees trembling, I caught a little something in my peripheral vision.</p>
<p>Someone was building an application of some kind and they were referencing something I had written for CSS-Tricks a few weeks prior. It was the most impossible, wonderful feeling I’ve ever had. And no, it’s not because of the fame and prestige although yes that is nice and I will take what I can get thank you very much. It’s the fact that this almost-college-dropout kid from a backwater town in the UK can write a little thing that helps someone on the other end of the world.</p>
<p>It’s an indescribable feeling, the rush and jolt of publishing I mean. (This is about to get sappy so bear with me). It’s a feeling of boundless enthusiasm for how words can be packaged and transported, and it’s this feeling that we can share ideas in this vast human society that we’re building together, a place where borders are just structures we’ve placed in between ourselves, and that words have momentum; a link to a website can lead to a book in your hand, to a friend at a party, to a conference in another town, to a long lasting love in a distant land.</p>
<p>Anyway, publishing on the web is an endless thrill, a sort of everlasting, punk-rock feeling and I hope it will never really go away.</p>
And Introducing: The Kickstarter2018-10-27T18:45:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/and-introducing-the-kickstarter/<p>Jez has just released a Kickstarter campaign for his new book called <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jezburrows/and-introducing-a-journey-to-the-end-of-the-cast-l">And Introducing</a> and I’ll let him take it away for the intro:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>From 'Exuberant Mourner' (Analyze This) to 'Arthritic Cowboy' (Who Framed Roger Rabbit), 'Sad Woman with Horns' (Guardians of the Galaxy) to 'Man Shot in Head 3' (The ABCs of Death), movie history is replete with curiously named characters bringing up the rear of the cast list. And Introducing is a survey of those bit-part and background character credits, organising them into almost 100 categories—some predictable (men, women, bystanders, henchmen) and some more surprising (screaming characters, toothless characters, characters whose names are simply their one line of dialogue).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The book is going to look something like this, designed in a similar style to the closing credits of a movie and quite frankly I could not be more excited for this project:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/jez-book.jpg" alt="jez-book.jpg" /></p>
<p>It’s a funny and curious little thing. I would highly recommend <a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jezburrows/and-introducing-a-journey-to-the-end-of-the-cast-l">supporting the project</a> right away because we need more things like this – joyous curiosities that make us all giggle.</p>
Design Systems at Gusto: Part II2018-10-23T05:48:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/design-systems-at-gusto-part-ii/<p>Lately I’ve been jotting down some haphazard notes about the challenges that the Design Systems team at Gusto has encountered along the way and I’m learning a whole bunch about how we should interact with the rest of the organization (a team of over a hundred engineers and a dozen designers working on our product).</p>
<p>Today our design systems team is made up of a designer, a design lead, and an engineer but — as our team has been ramping up — there’s some things have worked out really well, whilst other things not so much. But documenting each failure and success is important for me to keep growing as a designer/developer. Also? I’m a big fan of taking notes in general and a while back I wrote about how seemingly insignificant blog posts can <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/yay-computers/">improve the quality of your work over time:</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>My advice after learning from so many helpful people this weekend is this: if you’re thinking of writing something that explains a weird thing you struggled with on the Internet, do it! Don’t worry about the views and likes and Internet hugs. If you’ve struggled with figuring out this thing then be sure to jot it down, even if it’s unedited and it uses too many commas and you don’t like the tone of it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Besides trying to listen to my own advice, I always find it interesting to see how other teams and companies are dealing with the various complexities of making a great design system and I’ve learned an awful lot about how I should approach problems from those teams. But since every org is different, every design system has to cater itself to a new culture. So take all of this with a grain of salt as it might not apply to you.</p>
<p>Anyway, last time I ranted about <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/design-systems-at-gusto/">the mistakes</a> I’ve made along the way but this time I’d like to explore what’s been working in our favor and what’s changed for the better. So here are seven clickbaity things that I’ve discovered since then:</p>
<h2 id="1.-documentation-is-just-the-beginning" tabindex="-1">#1. Documentation is just the beginning <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/design-systems-at-gusto-part-ii/#1.-documentation-is-just-the-beginning" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Documenting everything about your front-end and UI should be a top priority for any design systems team — making sure that the team knows what fonts to install and which CSS classes they can use, as well as what components exist. Not to mention the hierarchy, color palette, icons, spacing, etc. etc. But! There’s a great number of things that can’t be documented in a design system, or at least things that are a bit trickier to document in practice. Accessibility standards for example, or when we ought to use component X over component Y, when to refactor a component, or even when to push back against a design and go back to the drawing board because of front-end constraints.</p>
<p><em>Side note: I’m not entirely sure that a design system can ever be fully documented.</em></p>
<p>To those uninitiated in the peculiar world of maintainable CSS and thinking about design as a complex set of interlocking parts, all of this stuff looks like frustrating dark magic. Everything in the field of design systems is cloaked in Medium-friendly rants and a thick veil of mystery to boot. Not only that but conversations are often bundled with an obtuse language. Yet our job as systems designers is to bridge the gap between this dark art and the designers around us.</p>
<p>I guess my point here is that documentation can only help so much with that.</p>
<p>What’s required to build a good design system is a new set of habits. When someone asks a question like “how does component X work?” they might not know that documentation exists. So, yes, sharing your docs regularly is important but being the public face of your system is just as important as the docs. Evangelizing the design system with every opportunity you get and making sure that all this doesn’t feel like a burden — that’s vital for the effectiveness of a system to scale in the long run.</p>
<p>One small thing we did a while back is to setup a Slack channel where any questions routed through it will often lead straight back to the docs we’ve written — but! — providing a space where people can ask questions is probably even more important than the docs themselves; everyone needs to feel involved in developing the system and everyone needs to have visibility into how we can improve our design standards.</p>
<p>However, as we began to develop the documentation for our design system and UI Kit in Figma I discovered something else, too.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/1_kahbFb8A4bPBuWkHZzhayw.png" alt="1_kahbFb8A4bPBuWkHZzhayw.png" /></p>
<h2 id="2.-pairing-is-worth-its-weight-in-gold" tabindex="-1">#2. Pairing is worth its weight in gold <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/design-systems-at-gusto-part-ii/#2.-pairing-is-worth-its-weight-in-gold" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>It’s not possible for the Design Systems team at Gusto to review every design or line of code that ships, and we certainly can’t provide feedback on every new component that makes it out the door. And that’s okay! But lately I’ve tried to pair with designers and engineers as frequently as I can, even if I haven’t been officially tasked with working on that project.</p>
<p>Here’s the thing: pairing with other designers is great because it’s highly effective user research.</p>
<p>Working side-by-side gives me a good idea of what documentation is missing in our codebase and in our design files in Figma. Do our designers and engineers know about our component library? Are they familiar with the latest best practices around HTML and CSS? Can my team do a better job explaining why using component X is beneficial to the organization as a whole? Can I steal this layout from the designer and make it an official pattern for everyone to adopt in the future?</p>
<p>I’ve read a lot about how other design teams have made office hours an important part of their evangelizing process to solve issues like this but when we started holding them we found that they weren’t quite as popular as we’d hoped. We assumed that office hours would welcome our designers and engineers to ask questions and would subsequently create a space for identifying issues, making our work more transparent, and in the process encouraging a more consistent visual language across Gusto.</p>
<p>Yet there’s one big problem with that approach for us…</p>
<h2 id="3.-designers-and-engineers-won't-know-when-they-need-you" tabindex="-1">#3. Designers and engineers won’t know when they need you <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/design-systems-at-gusto-part-ii/#3.-designers-and-engineers-won't-know-when-they-need-you" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>This lesson took me a good long while to figure out. When a design systems team forms at a company everything is likely to be somewhat overly complex and undocumented. Also, a lot of our codebase at Gusto is imprinted in our memory because we’ve spent years now rummaging around trying to understand and refactor it. My point is that during these pairing sessions we can help train designers and engineers with that institutional knowledge we have stashed away in our noggins and prevent more information from being silo’d away into different teams.</p>
<p>Plus, the codebase can and can’t do stuff, and those constraints aren’t always visible. Folks on the team might be unaware that there’s a limited set of colors to choose from, or that there’s a component that already exists that can solve this exact use case, or that we should be writing CSS in a certain way, or that we should avoid building this thing in this way because it violates our accessibility standards.</p>
<p>What feels like another round of burdensome design critique during office hours will often feel like a more collaborative, productive conversation whilst pairing. And so we both win in this scenario! We both get work done much faster and in a more collaborative spirit — product designers will learn about our system of front-end components and patterns whilst I get a better understanding of what they need to do their job well.</p>
<p>Speaking of which, I think it’s real easy to make a them versus us culture when it comes to design systems. I mean, just look at all these designers messing up your lovely system! How. Dare. They. But when you’re pairing with someone you can immediately get through all of that nonsense. You reset the social contract between you and the designer and you can create an environment where both of you can make significant improvements to the system without any of the silly drama.</p>
<p>Also, rather selfishly, frequently pairing with another designer or engineer helps spread that design systems knowledge around. A while back I noticed that once a pairing session was over then that designer/engineer would pass those lessons on to the next person on their team.</p>
<p>So a lot of the evangelizing work can be done for us if we’re constantly pairing with someone else. Trading knowledge in this way is important because we desperately need someone on every team to act as a translator, a person that can dive deep into the codebase and map its outlines and eccentricities, as well as someone that can make that map for designers and engineers easy to understand. We need folks that can figure out when to explore further, when to make camp for the night, and when to run away from all the bears.</p>
<p>Okay this analogy is adorable but it doesn’t really make sense anymore. Where was I?</p>
<h2 id="4.-oh-yeah-breaking-bad-habits-is-tough-because-it-can-sound-mean-and-obnoxious" tabindex="-1">#4. Oh yeah, breaking bad habits is tough because it can sound mean and obnoxious <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/design-systems-at-gusto-part-ii/#4.-oh-yeah-breaking-bad-habits-is-tough-because-it-can-sound-mean-and-obnoxious" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Understanding the tough UX issues that designers face on a daily basis and learning about the challenges that they’re tackling is a good first step. For example, if you’re a product designer working at a big organization then sometimes it’s hard to identify what’s a best practice or whether a pattern has been deprecated entirely. And that’s because at a certain size the communication between members of an org becomes fragmented; designers and engineers will miss a message from our team, they’ll skip an email, they’ll miss a session on a particular topic. That’s always bound to happen since so much is going on in an org that’s it’s impossible to keep up with everything.</p>
<p>Design system teams should empathize with this.</p>
<p>But I also worry that this sort of collaborative approach with a design systems team can feel nosey or unnecessary when someone like me butts in and cries “hey I can help!” — I often worry that our designers might think that this sort of assistance feels infantilizing and I fear that engineers will end up questioning why they need help from someone with less engineering experience to coach them in how our front-end works. These are issues I’m struggling to answer today.</p>
<p>Namely, and most importantly, how can I be as useful as possible without being a massive jerk?</p>
<p>Design systems feedback can end up sounding kinda mean. <em>Don’t use blue. Don’t put that there. Make sure that works on mobile. Don’t write CSS like that. This form is not accessible. Why did you need a new component there?</em> And in the past I’ve had difficulty describing why we shouldn’t build something or why a designer should go back to the drawing board and suggest another approach that fits better into the system of existing components and patterns.</p>
<p><em>Side note alert: if the motto of an improv troupe is “Yes, and…” then the motto of a design systems team is surely “Yes, but…”</em></p>
<p>Anyway, my team’s ultimate goal is to make it difficult for folks to do the “wrong thing” and to encourage <a href="https://blog.codinghorror.com/falling-into-the-pit-of-success/">a pit of success</a> — yes, but! — initiating a ton of rules and overhead at the beginning can be more dangerous than doing nothing at all. It can make you sound like an annoying control freak and once that happens then you risk building that community around design systems work that you need to do your job well. Engineers will begin to ignore your docs and designers will continue to go off into the wilderness and make interfaces that might not compliment what already exists.</p>
<p>So watch out for that — people will always ignore a jerk.</p>
<h2 id="5.-thankfully-building-a-community-around-design-systems-is-super-easy!" tabindex="-1">#5. Thankfully, building a community around design systems is super easy! <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/design-systems-at-gusto-part-ii/#5.-thankfully-building-a-community-around-design-systems-is-super-easy!" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Actually that’s also tough and I am a big liar. Building a stable, helpful and encouraging community around design systems requires a ton of energy because, as I mentioned before, a lot of folks won’t know when they need you. They won’t know if an interface is inaccessible or that another component exists already, and they might not be able to make that trade-off between design impact and engineering cost.</p>
<p>Building this community is also tough since it’s almost impossible to measure the success or even the effectiveness of a good design system. These sorts of problems are like dark matter; we know that they’re there but we can’t really measure them.</p>
<p>Here’s a hot take that you didn’t ask for: I believe that we won’t ever be able to measure problems in a design system and we should probably stop trying. There will never be a metric that you can pop into a spreadsheet that proves your design system is failing or, conversely, that your team is working in perfect harmony with one another. <a href="https://articles.uie.com/net-promoter-score-considered-harmful-and-what-ux-professionals-can-do-about-it/">NPS doesn’t work.</a> Instead, qualitative data is the only way to get a sense for how things are working in my opinion.</p>
<p>But if we can’t accurately measure the impact of a design system — or the problems that lead to the development of one — then how do we measure good work at all?</p>
<h2 id="6.-confusion-and-inefficiency-are-the-best-signs-of-design-system-failure" tabindex="-1">#6. Confusion and inefficiency are the best signs of design system failure <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/design-systems-at-gusto-part-ii/#6.-confusion-and-inefficiency-are-the-best-signs-of-design-system-failure" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>For design systems folks (the kind of people that live inside spreadsheets and have very neat and organized cupboards at home) this statement probably makes you feel uncomfortable. We all want data! And we want it now!</p>
<p>But let’s say a designer on your team heads off on a really long exploration of how forms ought to work in your app — that could be a sign that your components aren’t documented. Or if you see a lot of custom CSS overriding your core components — this could mean that you need to spend more time walking everyone through how flexible your components are. Confusion and inefficiency like this can’t be measured from a scale of one to ten or 🙂 to ☹️.</p>
<p>If a designer doesn’t want to pair with you on their feature then that’s another sign that the community around design systems needs a lot of work, and there’s not a metric for revealing that issue either.</p>
<p><em>Side note: collaborating with the design systems team shouldn’t feel like another critique. Instead, it should feel like you’re working 80 times faster and preventing a ton of future bugs and issues from popping up. It should make you more confident, more collaborative, and make you feel as if your talents can spread across the application and organization much faster than before.</em></p>
<p>Working with the design systems team should feel more productive than working alone. But…</p>
<h2 id="7.-be-wary-of-too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen" tabindex="-1">#7. Be wary of too many cooks in the kitchen <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/design-systems-at-gusto-part-ii/#7.-be-wary-of-too-many-cooks-in-the-kitchen" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>For a design systems team to be effective they have to flip from a dictatorship to a democracy at the flick of the switch. This is just so that things can get done: not everyone in your entire organization can be allowed to have an opinion about border-radius or the color of your cards because otherwise your systems team will feel immobilized by indecision and nothing will get built.</p>
<p>It’s easy for a tiny issue to scale up into a larger one until you have the whole design team in a room talking about how your text styles ought to work. Quite frankly this isn’t an effective use of everyone’s time since designers could be solving much larger UX problems that have a significant financial impact to the business, rather than having to deal with font sizes or colors. Noting their anger is very important, and getting feedback is vital, but taking their opinions into account over every detail…not so much.</p>
<p>In the early days of our design systems team at Gusto we struggled with this issue frequently. We all felt a little nervous about when to make a hard decision and when to explore ideas, when to keep iterating, or when to push back on a design. And we frequently would ask the whole team about how our brand should be expressed visually — yes, but! — this slowed us down immensely. Components would have to go through a series of reviews and people started to feel scared of touching our codebase or trying to improve things across the system if it wasn’t the perfect solution for everyone.</p>
<p>Here’s another hot take: I stopped caring about the “perfect” solution to a design problem a long time ago. Our work on a design systems team should be to turn up every day and make our system just 1% better.</p>
<p>Anyway, I slowly came to the conclusion that everyone should be involved and kept up to date but not everyone should have an opinion that blocks progress. The design systems team is constantly talking to the rest of the design org at Gusto about what we’ve accomplished and what we’re working on — and we’ll open up the floor to get feedback about all sorts of things because designers should feel empowered to criticize us and pitch us new ideas, or even to teach us new things.</p>
<p>But a good design system cannot be built by committee.</p>
<h2 id="8.-design-price-points-can-help-resolve-arguments" tabindex="-1">#8. Design Price Points can help resolve arguments <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/design-systems-at-gusto-part-ii/#8.-design-price-points-can-help-resolve-arguments" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>I’ve been working with Jordan Townsend on a number of projects lately — he’s an infuriatingly talented designer at Gusto and he has an interesting way of dealing with my design systems nonsense. Whenever we chat about a new project he always shows me three potential solutions to a problem.</p>
<p>The first is what he considers to be the most expensive solution. This is most likely a new component or a modified version of what already exists in our codebase. Some of this stuff is delightful and really pushes the boundaries of what’s possible with SVG or CSS. However, it’s often difficult sometimes to make the engineering case for this new change. Should we really invest X number of hours polishing this UI if the user will only see it for a few minutes? Can we say this investment is worth the cost? Probably not.</p>
<p>The next option is the “cheapest” solution where Jordan will try to use an existing component that doesn’t push the limits of our system at all.</p>
<p>Finally, the third option, is a combination of the first two. It’s a design that hopes to push the standards of our system whilst also solving the problem in an elegant way. Often this shows us that a component is inflexible and too rigid to adapt to a designer’s everyday needs. It’s then clear to us how we can fix a whole swathe of little bugs, or perhaps how we ought to document a component in more detail.</p>
<p>I really can’t tell you how great this method of design is for collaboration, and for making our system 1% better every day.</p>
<p>In the past, when Jordan showed me just one design and often the most expensive solution in isolation, it was difficult to make the case against it. Because, yes — this design solves the problem the user is experiencing in the most efficient and elegant way imaginable but it will often take a disproportionate amount of time to build. And so a lot of my “Yes but…” criticisms at that time often made it sound like I was questioning the purpose of good design itself.</p>
<p><em>Side note: I often struggle describing the impact that a new design will likely have on the rest of our components and I fear that it makes me sound like I am arguing against design.</em></p>
<p>Anyway, as a member of a design systems team you have a responsibility to the codebase and that interlocking system of existing parts that are often difficult for others to see. But if a new component or pattern doesn’t fit neatly into the system and can’t be reused again then it’s difficult to sign off on it. However, it’s likewise tough to push back against it. To solve this issue then we desperately need to build a collaborative relationship with the designers and engineers so that when we give feedback it doesn’t sound like we’re dunking on them and their work.</p>
<p>These design price points are an effective solution then to this problem because we get to barter amongst the team and find the right balance.</p>
<h2 id="the-design-systems-loop" tabindex="-1">The Design Systems Loop <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/design-systems-at-gusto-part-ii/#the-design-systems-loop" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>There’s a wonderful quote by Aza Raskin, although I’ve forgotten where he said it now, but I think it about all the time. He argued that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Design is not about learning to think outside the box, it’s about finding the right box to think inside of.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And when it comes to design systems I think that’s exactly what’s so tough about it. Not only do you have to learn when and how to draw the box to think inside of, but you have to get everyone else in an organization to think inside that box, too.</p>
<p>Let’s imagine you’re facing a situation where a designer proposes a new component. Is this issue specifically a front-end one? Is it a much larger UX issue where we can circumnavigate the engineering costs entirely? Is this new functionality I can add to an existing component to save us time? Does this problem require that I make new rules and guidelines to prevent it from happening again? Which box is the right one to think of inside here?</p>
<p>Anyway, bear with this tangent for a moment, but I’ve been reading a lot of the <a href="https://bossfightbooks.com/">Boss Fight Books</a> lately which happen to be all about videogame design (in fact, I would highly recommend the <a href="https://bossfightbooks.com/products/metal-gear-solid-by-ashly-and-anthony-burch">Metal Gear Solid</a> and <a href="https://bossfightbooks.com/products/spelunky-by-derek-yu">Spelunky</a> books regardless of which point on the designer/engineer spectrum you’re on). There’s a common thread between each of these books where every designer worth their salt will obsess over “the loop”.</p>
<p>In shoot ’em ups that loop could be:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>shoot, crouch, reload, move</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Whereas in a game like Breath of the Wild that loop might look like this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>get horse, ride horse, find enemy, wack enemy</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This gameplay loop will repeat itself endlessly and if the loop isn’t fun or if the pacing is off then the game won’t feel right. So designers have to question whether a new addition to their game will improve the loop or whether it obstructs the flow.</p>
<p>So these books about video games and design loops got me thinking: what’s the design systems equivalent of a loop? And if there is such a thing then perhaps we can prevent a whole bunch of future problems if we identify it up front. Therefore, based on that quote by Aza that I stole above (and will now attempt to take credit for), I reckon that a designer on a systems team has the following loop:</p>
<ol>
<li>Draw the box to think inside of</li>
<li>Get the whole organization to hop right into that box with you</li>
<li>Constantly redraw the box until the end of time based on changing business and organizational needs</li>
</ol>
<p>This feels helpful to me, but I’m not sure! Feelings!</p>
Areas of Concern2018-10-08T04:36:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/areas-of-concern/<p>I listened to a great episode of Shop Talk Show the other day with Eric Meyer all about <a href="https://shoptalkshow.com/episodes/331-think-like-front-end-developer-eric-meyer/">how to think like a front-end developer</a> and there’s one bit that caught my attention. It’s the part where Chris asks the question “what is a front-end developer today?” And around the 10:58 mark, Eric responds like this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What it looks like now, to me anyway, is somebody who worries about the HTML, the CSS, the JavaScript, the performance in the browser. [...] But that’s what they take as their area of, not only expertise, but concern.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I suppose it’s the Brit in me but I love that Eric doesn’t emphasis professionalism or skills, but concern and worry. I mentioned this a while ago but that’s just the sort of thing that I’m looking for in interviews, too. Although I phrased it <a href="https://twitter.com/robinrendle/status/1040294218575437824">like this</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>During a front-end interview earlier this week I realized that I’m looking for folks that happen to be riddled with self doubt. There’s never one way to build anything on the web and being confident is always more trouble than it’s worth.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I think <em>concern</em> is a better word for it then self-doubt. Anyway, the whole episode with Eric is super interesting and worthy of your time.</p>
Nesting Classes in Sass2018-10-03T06:07:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/nesting-classes/<p>The other day <a href="https://twitter.com/brad_frost/status/1046813109481091072">Brad Frost asked</a> how you would make a new class with Sass and he gave two options that look like this:</p>
<pre><code>.c-btn {}
.c-btn__icon {}
/* or */
.c-btn {
&__icon {}
}
</code></pre>
<p>The thread that branches off that original tweet is great since folks explore alternatives to these two options and the pros and cons for each which is neat.</p>
<p>Personally though? I prefer the 1st option, only because I find it easier to search for in the codebase and it makes things a little bit more future proof. If you have a new bit of functionality to add quickly then you can just make a new class. Otherwise I’ve found in the past that nesting classes within one another can shortly make the code really difficult to read and debug.</p>
<p>Also, my pal Hector Virgen mentioned that this is how he would do it:</p>
<pre><code>.c {
&- {
&b {
&t {
&n {
// good luck finding this!!
}
}
}
}
}
</code></pre>
<p>And now I have shared the curse with you.</p>
The 2nd Trip to Portland2018-09-29T00:45:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-flight-from-portland-to-san-francisco/<p>The flight from Portland to San Francisco is perfect. It’s just the right amount of time for you to admire the romance of flight and the wonder that is unaccosted flight through American airspace without coming to the conclusion that you’re stuck in a floating metal sky prison.</p>
<p>I have a lot of fondness for this trip for many reasons.</p>
<p>Heathrow through LA and up to Portland marked my first trip through the west coast of America back in 2015 for XOXO. I still remember the striking blue and the beaches of southern California that soon merge into Oregon’s vast expanse of treelined forests. And for the whole trip my nose was squished up against the window – I found, for the first time in my life, to be falling for a place. I knew no-one in this giant country, and yet oddly enough I had the feeling I was returning to somewhere familiar. It’s weird and I can’t quite explain it.</p>
<p>Three years later and I’m on a similar flight (this time I’m in Portland for My Brother My Brother And Me) and it’s fun to think about how much has changed. I’m no longer alone in this great expanse, a small band of horrifyingly smart and funny friends are meeting me there. My home in San Francisco feels like home for the first time.</p>
<p>And now I’m perched above a cloud, listening to <a href="https://open.spotify.com/track/2s7P2J6uDTsqeXJIiRfhGi?si=MyPDz4CzRyO45otoq0a4zg">Out of Nothing, Everything</a> by Dan Romer and I’m smiling a big, dumb smile.</p>
A Rant after a Day2018-09-28T03:42:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/a-rant-after-a-day/<p>Today was a <em>day</em>. It was exhausting and upsetting, and not the useful kind but rather instead the kind that strips you of all of your energy and enthusiasm. The kind that makes you climb back into bed with your tail between your legs.</p>
<p>Out of anger at today’s events I tried to be productive. I updated my Trello board, ticked a few boxes, wrote a few link posts for CSS-Tricks, updated <a href="https://robinrendle.com/adventures/">the Adventures microsite</a>, and nudged an interface one step closer towards being complete. It’s the part of a project where I look back at it now and I’m kinda sorta proud of what we’ve built and what I’ve learnt along the way.</p>
<p>This new feature for a large web app isn’t going to change the world; it’s not going to inspire anyone or make them swoon with visual ecstasy. It’s just going to be a thing that works. And I think that’s enough.</p>
<hr />
<p>Our office is across the hall from Uber and the other day they installed these big posters after <a href="https://www.uber.design/case-studies/rebrand-2018">the redesign</a>. These posters feel invasive, like a political slogan trying to slip you a soundbite. And yes, you know the drill. Stuff about changing the world. Connecting communities. Brand stuff.</p>
<p>But the longer I walk past those signs the more I think there’s something dangerous or foolish, petulant even, about trying to change the world like that. About having the gumption of being a software company that wants to do the work of a sovereign government. Uber and Google and Facebook – large portions of these companies shouldn’t be privately owned in my opinion as it’s dangerous to let a handful of Silicon Valley companies (that dodge taxes) dictate the future of our society. And it’s not for making the world a better place. Save that crap for the posters. They want the fame and the capital and the bragging rights.</p>
<hr />
<p>I was talking to a designer the other day and a thought crept into my head; how many designers or engineers do you know that work at a government agency? I can tell you six that work at Twitter. Twenty, maybe more, that work at Google. How have we have let our public institutions be a source of embarrassment or shame? How have we forgotten what government is for? Why do I not want to go work on a large, publicly owned web app?</p>
<p>This Steve Jobs-esque fantasy to be at the very heart of things and to rule the world is the stuff of kings and backwater monarchies. And wanting to be an Uber or a Facebook or a whatever feels like anti-government sentiment to me. And I hate that recent events have led us all to point at those government institutions and sneer at them. Government might be broken, yes. But it’s fixable. We just need to reimagine what government is for. That’s the hard part.</p>
<p>Anyway, I’m rambling. But you don’t have to put a dent in the universe. You can just be kind. And put things back where you found them. And make a few people laugh along the way.</p>
<p>That’s all we need.</p>
iA Writer2018-09-21T04:36:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/ia-writer/<p>My favorite writing app has just been updated to include tags that you write just like a hashtag in a document, such as <code>#design</code>. Then all of your tags are organized and can easily be found for later. I’m not sure how useful this will be for archiving or writing but I love the enthusiasm of Oliver Reichenstein in <a href="https://ia.net/writer/blog/write-to-organize">the announcement post</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>After a couple of weeks with tags, I don’t know what-what I’d do without them. More folders? Nah. Suddenly I need much fewer folders to keep things in order. Especially on small touch devices tags are a blessing. Just tag it. If you feel like it, you can order it on a point and click device later. Being able to write tags from within the documents completely changes the game.</p>
</blockquote>
Songs for a Writer’s Cabin2018-08-30T01:47:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/songs-for-a-writers-cabin/<p>Cabin is my work buddy. My meditation buddy. My focus buddy. Cabin is a Spotify playlist that I’ve been adding songs to for a very long time now and it has almost ten hours of music to help me get work done.</p>
<p>Pretty much everything I’ve ever published and every line of code I’ve ever written has been typed whilst listening to this playlist of mostly instrumental melodies. Hopefully you might find it just as soothing and creepy and wonderful, too:</p>
<iframe src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/user/robinrendle/playlist/6V3hYPBCzmF1IsHRePRD8p" width="300" height="380" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allow="encrypted-media"></iframe>
Break the Browser2018-08-22T04:33:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/break-the-browser/<p>In this game there a lot of rules. The interfaces we design should be accessible to everyone, from color blind users and those that might have limited vision, to those that might not be using a keyboard or a touch screen. Those interfaces ought to be fast and highly performant, we probably shouldn’t load too many fonts, or too many high definition images. Not to mention we should care deeply about semantics, color contrast, etc. etc. etc.</p>
<p>But I reckon it’s important to remember that we don’t always have to make the web for someone else. The web is for us, too.</p>
<p>What I mean by that is we shouldn’t let these rules influence our weird side projects. Websites can be weird and broken and don’t always have to follow all the best practices. We can make wild and foolish experiments that are inaccessible, with tiny font sizes, bad performance, inaccessible color contrast, multiple JS frameworks, for no reason whatsoever besides that we can. We shouldn’t, but we can hijack the scroll, we can override the default keyboard commands, we can have every part of our interface make a booming sound, and we can try our very best to break the browser as we see fit.</p>
<p>And so, over the last two weeks I’ve been working on a project just like that. It’s inspired by those sci-fi interfaces you might see Harrison Ford looking at in Blade Runner or the sort that Tom Cruise picks up in Minority Report. It’s just a collection of fake data and nonsense graphs that happens to look super cool. I call it: Useless Dashboard.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/useless-dashboard.gif" alt="useless-dashboard.gif" /></p>
<p>It’s just a fun webpage I made to see what I can do with CSS Grid really, where I try to make things look like they don’t really fit on a grid. And it’s all sorts of fun! Instead of worrying about semantics (which don’t really make much sense in this context) I’ve sort of started to see this side project in a very different light. All my web design work is really centered around designing information, but this is much more like painting where I’m throwing stuff all over the place and seeing what sticks.</p>
<p>And this feeling is somewhat liberating. To not be shackled by all those best practices and rules. To feel that I can do whatever the heck I want without anyone looking over my shoulder and judging me. I don’t have to worry about performance or naming conventions, or directory structure, as I can do whatever I please without feeling all that anxiety of making the most perfect website.</p>
<p>This thing is pure, hot garbage, and I love it.</p>
Saving Zelda2018-08-19T01:51:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/saving-zelda/<p>Back in 2012 Tevis Thompson wrote a lovely essay called <a href="http://tevisthompson.com/saving-zelda/">Saving Zelda</a> where he argued that the franchise had lost its way. He treks through the history of Zelda and provides some insight as to what precisely was forgotten over the years since the original game:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The point of a hero’s adventure (and Zelda is the hero’s adventure in gaming) is not to make you feel better about yourself. The point is to grow, to overcome, to in some way actually become better. If a legendary quest has no substantial challenge, if it asks nothing of you except that you jump through the hoops it so carefully lays out for you, then the very legend is unworthy of being told, and retold. [...] Meaningful difficulty, in which successes are owned and failures chastise rather than annoy, would more deeply engage the player, making her responsible, necessary, worthy of the legend. Not just the recipient of a gold star, the kind you get for showing up.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Thompson continues:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Zelda is a perfect candidate for environmental storytelling. A Hyrule you can dwell in, despite its limitations (perhaps because of them), with gameplay that compels you further in – such a world will produce its own stories. It will speak without over-signaling, it will invite readings without being immediately legible, it will become evocative, a space to be occupied by imagination. A place of wonder.</p>
<p>To do this, Hyrule must become more indifferent to the player. It must aspire to ignore Link. Zelda has so far resisted the urge to lavish choice on the player and respond to his every whim, but it follows a similar spirit of indulgence in its loving details, its carefully crafted adventure that reeks of quality and just-for-you-ness. But a world is not for you. A world needs a substance, an independence, a sense that it doesn’t just disappear when you turn around (even if it kinda does). It needs architecture, not level design with themed wallpaper, and environments with their own ecosystems (which were doing just fine before you showed up). Every location can’t be plagued with false crises only you can solve, grist for the storymill.</p>
</blockquote>
Spelunky2018-08-18T18:59:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/spelunky/<p>In my favorite book from the <a href="https://bossfightbooks.com/">Boss Fight Books</a> collection, Derek Yu describes the process of designing and building the excellent rogue-like platformer <a href="https://bossfightbooks.com/products/spelunky-by-derek-yu">Spelunky</a>. There are far too many lovely moments to detail in full but one of my favorite stories is where Derek describes how he handled the requests of a beta tester that found the game far too difficult:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Interestingly enough, I noticed from the angry player’s posts that while he was getting more and more angry, he was also making progress, getting to the later levels and eventually beating the game. This convinced me that the difficulty itself was not the problem, and that I was right to not include an easy mode in the game, since it would have become an unnecessary crutch for players like him. The real culprits were all of the aggregate smaller annoyances that made interacting with the game more difficult. Spelunky did get easier with each update, but in a way that improved the core experience rather than watering it down. So in some sense, that angry player was right: The game was too hard. But not for the reasons he or I assumed. If we were talking about the game of tennis instead of Spelunky, it’s as though this player asked me to remove the net because he was having trouble hitting the ball over it, neither of us realizing that the real problem was that I gave him a racket with broken strings.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I adore this little section because I find myself encountering this problem all the time in user testing sessions at work. A lot of users will say “I had a problem with X and so it would be better if it worked like Y.” And yet, however helpful this might be, designers must ignore their suggestions because X is most likely not the problem. It’s the effect, but it’s not the cause.</p>
<p>Anyway, even if you’ve never played Spelunky before I would recommend this book in a heart beat. It’s effortlessly charming and sweet, not to mention that it’s one of the very few books that reveals just how complex game design truly is. It’s a book about having high standards, about remixing genres, about loving something so much that it hurts. This is my second time reading Derek’s book, and I almost never return to a book once I’ve finished with it.</p>
<p>TL;DR please go and pick this one up.</p>
And Introducing2018-08-15T02:08:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/and-introducing/<p>My pal Jez Burrows is working on a new project and a week ago he asked me to build what ended up being a rather lovely teaser site. It’s called <a href="https://www.jezburrows.com/andintroducing/">And Introducing</a> and I hope you sign up for the newsletter to learn more about it in the future.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/Screenshot%202018-08-14%2021.21.jpg" alt="Screenshot 2018-08-14 21.21.jpg" /></p>
<p>I really want to spoil the whole thing but all I’ll say for now is that you ought to read the credits there. And don’t forget to sign up for <a href="https://buttondown.email/robinrendle">Adventures</a> where this weekend I’ll probably dig into the typography decisions that we made a little bit more.</p>
The History of the Web2018-08-09T23:44:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-history-of-the-web/<p>I’m not sure if you’ve heard about this but <a href="https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/">The History of the Web</a> newsletter is simply outstanding and you ought to sign up immediately if publishing, web design and development is in your wheelhouse.</p>
<p>One of my favorite posts is this one: imagine a time before images on the web. For years there was nothing but a sea of text and then, in the summer of 1993 the Mosaic browser launched with <a href="https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/the-origin-of-the-img-tag/">the quiet, humble introduction of the <code>img</code> tag</a>. It changed everything about the web.</p>
<p>And I think that’s why I adore this newsletter – with each issue it reminds me that the web is this amorphous, ever-changing community of technologies that can change over time. This little newsletter reminds me that the web is an exciting, wondrous, unfinished place.</p>
10,000 Original Copies2018-08-09T21:57:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/original-copies/<p>Kris Sowersby has posted the transcript for his talk, <a href="https://klim.co.nz/blog/10000-original-copies/">10,000 Original Copies</a>, which happens to be all about copying and original ideas when it comes to designing new typefaces:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Erik van Blokland ran a small experiment: he scanned a lowercase ‘n’ and asked about 80 designers to digitise it. All we had to do was wrap our own vector outlines around it and send it back. The fascinating result was that with 80 different designers — all digitising the same letterform — no two points lined up. There was, in effect, 80 original copies from 80 different designers.</p>
<p>[...]And it made me realise this is what we are all doing. We’re taking the planks from masters, and building our own ships. We are making ships in our own image, in our own languages, in our own accents.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Kris notes how this sort of thinking about copies and remixes has bled into his own work and experience:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Over the last 10 years or so I redrew National, one of my first typefaces, as National 2. It’s completely redrawn, no two letterforms are exactly the same, and I added a bunch of new styles. But to me it is still National. It’s what I wanted to draw 10 years ago, but didn’t have the skill, time or patience.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This idea of remixing, refactoring, and tidying up old designs is precisely why I chose <a href="https://klim.co.nz/retail-fonts/national-2/">National 2</a> for the most recent design of my website. And, subsequently, for a while now I’ve had this very kooky idea of rewriting and redesigning some older pieces of mine and seeing just how different they are with years of experience piled on top.</p>
Growing Up Jobs2018-08-06T04:10:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/growing-up-jobs/<p>For Vanity Fair, Lisa Brennan-Jobs has written about <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/08/lisa-brennan-jobs-small-fry-steve-jobs-daughter">her father, Steve</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>By then the idea that he’d named the failed computer after me was woven in with my sense of self, even if he did not confirm it, and I used this story to bolster myself when, near him, I felt like nothing. I didn’t care about computers—they were made of fixed metal parts and chips with glinting lines inside plastic cases—but I liked the idea that I was connected to him in this way. It would mean I’d been chosen and had a place, despite the fact that he was aloof or absent. It meant I was fastened to the earth and its machines. He was famous; he drove a Porsche. If the Lisa was named after me, I was a part of all that.</p>
<p>I see now that we were at cross-purposes. For him, I was a blot on a spectacular ascent, as our story did not fit with the narrative of greatness and virtue he might have wanted for himself. My existence ruined his streak. For me, it was the opposite: the closer I was to him, the less I would feel ashamed; he was part of the world, and he would accelerate me into the light.</p>
</blockquote>
My Increasing Wariness of Dogmatism2018-08-02T17:58:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/my-increasing-wariness-of-dogmatism/<p>I think about <a href="https://css-tricks.com/increasing-wariness-dogmatism/">this post all about dogmatism</a> by Chris perhaps twice a week:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Hardly a day goes by I don’t see a dogmatic statement about the web. I was collecting them for a while, but I won't share them as there is no sense in shaming anyone. I'm as guilty as anyone.</p>
<p>The dogmatic part comes from the way an opinion is phrased. I feel like people do it sometimes just for emphasis. To sound bold and proud, via brevity.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I catch myself in this mode sometimes, of boldly declaring “that’s not the way to do it!” when it comes to front-end development or design. But dogmatism isn’t helpful, it doesn’t make me sound clever or wise, and it just increases the wariness of people around me to ask for help or guidance on an issue. You can see it in my writing sometimes, too. My inner 20th century German graphic designer takes over and suddenly the writing is obnoxious and mean.</p>
<p>Chris shows a couple ways to tackle this though:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>First, make peace with the fact that the world (and the web) is a huge place with incredible diversity, in every sense of that word. Everyone's situation is different than yours. You can't know everything. There is endless gray area.</p>
<p>Second, it's possible to re-work a dogmatic statement into something more productive.</p>
<p>[...] It’s certainly wordier to avoid dogma when you're trying to make a point. But it's more honest. It's more clear. It's showing empathy for people out there doing things different. It makes it easier for others to empathize with you.</p>
</blockquote>
The Late Muscle2018-08-01T06:21:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-late-muscle/<p>“I am compulsive about that,” <a href="http://www.merlinmann.com/roderick/ep-298-private-road.html">Merlin explains</a> of his obsession with punctuality and trying to teach those lessons to his kid:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You can’t explain how important it is that if we need to leave the house by 7:30 […] if we made it by 7:31 then [...] Apollo has crashed. That’s it. You don’t get another chance at this. Every day you do you’re building a late muscle.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I love that idea of the late muscle. Why? Because I have one. Lately I’ve felt as if I’m late to meetings all the time. I’m flakey. Unpredictable. I bail on my friends constantly and at the last second I’ll be heading to an event and just drop out before I get there.</p>
<p>I need to try harder with this stuff. A lot harder. Like, I need to try at least a tiny bit. Because once you start caring less about punctuality and showing up on time it gets increasingly difficult to fix. The late muscle has already grown strong.</p>
From San Francisco to Los Angeles2018-07-27T06:49:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/from-san-francisco-to-los-angeles/<p>You can see the climate crisis everywhere, in everything.</p>
<p>On the drive down you can see it in the signs that are posted in the dirt by farms on the edge of the freeway: “BUILD DAMS!” they scream. “WE NEED WATER, NOW” another sign begs in giant sans-serif letters next to it. You can see the climate crisis in the crops that stretch to the horizon that ought to be green but are a Mad Max gold instead. You can even feel the climate crisis in the air itself when pulses of heat ripple through the land, just a few degrees short of becoming unbearable, unlivable.</p>
<p>It’s clear that the climate crisis isn’t going to be some distant trouble of Nairobi or Singapore and you don’t need a degree in climate science to see that California is a paradise in the midst of a catastrophe.</p>
<p>All the signs are here.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/IMG_4563-1.jpg" alt="IMG_4563-1.jpg" /></p>
<p>Los Angeles starts with a bang; after a five hour drive on a dead-straight road and caught under the gaze of a mean star you’re welcomed into the city by a national park and roads that swoop, duck, and peak around the hillsides as if they want you to play with them in the shadows. And play you do. Your motorcycle perks up – this is the type of road that he’s been waiting for.</p>
<p>Winding highways lead you through Beverly Hills at dusk. Playboys are driving around in Bugattis and Ferraris but you’re much faster, you’re nimble and efficient, and you dart between them with ease. Your motorcycle is a high precision tool, one that dances between their flash cars that are stuck in traffic despite how expensive they are. It appears as if LA traffic doesn’t care when their next album is dropping and doesn’t care how much money they make. The traffic will gobble them all up either way.</p>
<p>With a light touch on the throttle you blitz past and leave them in your dust.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/14.jpg" alt="14.jpg" /></p>
<p>The next day is your birthday. You wake up and head towards the hills and up and around Mulholland Drive. You see the urban sprawl for the first time in all its sheer horror/wonder. You gasp at this city that people have built in such a short amount of time. But LA is not really a city, you realize, it’s a megacity – a metropolis built around the automobile.</p>
<p>The whole time you’ve been in LA you’ve been wondering where all the movie money goes, now you turn a corner and you find that it’s just been plowed back into the hillsides. Hundreds, thousands of mansions and gorgeous homes dot the cliffs and valleys of the surrounding neighborhoods.</p>
<p>Something like this in England would be torn down in a heartbeat but, out here, flaunting wealth in this way is somehow inspirational to people. We would likely see it as capitalism on steroids. Mass hysteria. People just shouldn’t have this much money. It’s broken, the whole damn thing is broken, you think as you boom around the hillsides.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/3-a79d5e.jpg" alt="3-a79d5e.jpg" /></p>
<p>After driving around the city all day you notice something else: this place wasn’t designed for human people. Not just because of the highways and cars, but also the heat and the architecture. There’s just no shade to be found anywhere, as everyone hides inside their cars and homes where air conditioning can easily be found.</p>
<p>Public spaces should always have plenty of shade in a city that sits on the edge of the sun like LA though. At the Griffith Observatory a man drops like a stone in line because of the heat and the whole world goes mad for a minute as an ambulance and a fire truck rush to the rescue.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/IMG_4607-1.jpg" alt="IMG_4607-1.jpg" /></p>
<p>It’s impossible to get anywhere without a car in LA but it’s also impossible to park. Thankfully your bike can fit on the pavement, behind a bush, on the very tip of the road and tuck up and out of the way for everyone else. Parking is always free, too.</p>
<p>From the Observatory you can see the haze of pollution that hovers over the city at all times of the day, producing beautiful sunsets of orange and the brightest of pinks at night. The climate crisis is something I can’t stop thinking about because here it’s unavoidable. You can’t hide from it, as even in the family-friendly tourist spots, apocalypse looms.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/38.jpg" alt="38.jpg" /></p>
<p>The next day you’re on the bike again. You’re bored of the heat and since a kid you’ve wanted to drive on the Pacific Coast Highway. Well, now’s your chance.</p>
<p>On the way out of the city you drive into another fancy area with McMansions everywhere. At an intersection you get caught in the traffic for a moment and suddenly you find yourself locking eyes with the actress that plays Maeby Fünke in Arrested Development, Alia Shawkat. It’s a weird moment where Hollywood is no longer teeming with movie stars but with people going about doing their jobs. All the magic of the place vanishes with that quick glance.</p>
<p>Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford, Emma Stone and Kanye are quite likely stuck on the same road, sat right behind you, fuming at the traffic that materialized out of nowhere. And they’re late for work.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/IMG_4705.jpg" alt="IMG_4705.jpg" /></p>
<p>Next stop: Malibu. The repressive heat fades into the background as the sea air picks up. You know that you’ll always live by the sea and there’s no use fighting it.</p>
<p>You’re going to drive the whole thing. Fourteen hours, all the way back up to San Francisco. Through aches and pains you smile and push on to the next city; Santa Barbara, then Santa Maria. The miles, just like the beaches and golf clubs, the mountains and canyons, fly right past you.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/IMG_4710-1.jpg" alt="IMG_4710-1.jpg" /></p>
<p>Each mile on a motorcycle is a new adventure and a new problem though. A cardboard box is swept off a truck and comes barreling towards you on the freeway. You have to swerve to avoid it. Usually that wouldn’t be all that scary in a car but on a motorcycle everything is, well, designed to kill you.</p>
<p>You remember one story of how a family friend got wiped out on a highway because a plastic bag got stuck in their front tire of their bike. Your eyes are constantly alert along the hillsides and tree tops, along the city streets for all existential dangers that might be hiding there, plastic bags included.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/IMG_4731-1.jpg" alt="IMG_4731-1.jpg" /></p>
<p>After seven hours of driving you break off from the mountains and onto the coast once again. You’re going to drive the long way up. You stop to take a break at the top of a mountain and look across the quiet landscape. It’s beautifully, wondrously quiet.</p>
<p>The clouds are tumbling about in the sea of blue above you and are constantly shape-shifting in an effort to impress and cajole you into looking at them.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/IMG_4739-1.jpg" alt="IMG_4739-1.jpg" /></p>
<p>The sun is starting to set now. But your bike is ready again. In certain moments your motorcycle is like a horse with a personality and suddenly becomes impatient, wants to get going and move things along. You can feel his anticipation and excitement for what we’re about to do next along these cliffs.</p>
<p>Either that or the California desert sun has finally pushed you over the edge.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/IMG_4775.jpg" alt="IMG_4775.jpg" /></p>
<p>You knew that the Pacific Coast Highway, the winding paths that skirt the tip of the ocean and the land, would be a beautiful drive but it’s difficult to put into words just how breathtaking it is once you get there. Despite your attempts, pictures simply won’t do it justice.</p>
<p>As the sun sets quickly you begin to run out of fuel and you’re nervous but you’re not panicking. Once everything is pitch black, shadows break through the fog and every moment after that is like Alan Wake or Limbo – a dream of shadows and lights that whisk all up and around you. You can’t see the ocean anymore but the stars are waving up above.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/IMG_4750-1.jpg" alt="IMG_4750-1.jpg" /></p>
<p>It’s now 1am. You’re listening to a podcast in the dark, accelerating at top speed around seaside cliffs, and you can’t stop smiling.</p>
The Vietnam War2018-07-22T03:19:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-vietnam-war/<p>Over the past week or so I’ve been slowly watching <em>The Vietnam War</em>, a documentary on Netflix by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, and it’s just completely, impossibly brilliant.</p>
<p>I’m not sure if this has ever happened in war documentaries before but the show interviews all sides, Americans as well as North and South Vietnamese, as the veterans tell their side of the story of the same conflict, the same battle even. It’s horrifying and frightening but there are so many stories that need to be heard here. One North Vietnamese veteran looks at the interviewer as they discuss the use of napalm by the American Air Force, and he looks at her and says “The world became an ocean of fire. Can you imagine an ocean of fire?”</p>
<p>Not only has the show got a wonderful format and director to boot, but the score that accompanies it is fantastic as well. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross fill almost every scene with brooding anger and broken harmonies. To be quite honest though I’m an enormous Nine Inch Nails fan and the work that the two have done for scores and other soundtracks is probably my favorite sort of music.</p>
<p>Anyway, I would highly recommend that you put some time aside to watch this thing. It’s tough going and shocking but it needs to be watched. <em>The Vietnam War</em> asks that we look deep into the heart of this ugly moment in time, so that we may never make the same mistakes again.</p>
Networks of New York2018-07-15T02:29:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/networks-of-new-york/<p>Ingrid Burrington’s <em>Networks of New York</em> begins with a simple enough question: “How do you see the Internet?” Ingrid then explores just how shortsighted our understanding of that question quite probably is. I’ve heard the distinction made before that the web sits on top of the Internet; we use the web via URLs and webpages but we access it all with that mostly underground system of physical wires and cables. So the web is basically a tin can whilst the Internet is the string in between that one and another.</p>
<p>Ingrid argues that thinking about that infrastructure is important because it helps us understand our world:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sometimes people who want to learn about seeing Internet infrastructure ask me to tell them “where the Internet lives.” At first glance, this seems like a bit of a misnomer—the Internet isn’t a static object, it’s defined by the constant movement of information. It doesn’t “live” anywhere; it’s already everywhere at once…</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ingrid’s description here sounds like the beginning of a horror movie, almost as if human society has been infected with this new kind of infrastructure or something. However, Ingrid admits that although thinking about the Internet can be frightening – what with its sheer vastness and globe-trotting scale – it’s important not to forget that it’s also a miracle. Ingrid writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s weirdly comforting, inspiring even, to walk down Sixth Avenue with the knowledge that buried underneath my feet is a fiber optic cable that is carrying conversations, photographs, stories, secrets, and <em>lives</em> as beams of light through hair-thin strands of glass.</p>
</blockquote>
Jack and the Magic Key2018-07-10T06:17:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/jack-and-the-magic-key/<p>It’s 2007: I’m sat in the kitchen watching a family friend and her four year old son talk to my mom. Over the course of a few minutes I notice how this kid, Jack, is starting to get bored; his eyes roll into the back of his head and all of his limbs begin to fidget independently of the host as if he’s possessed by the spirit of boredom itself.</p>
<p>In a flash my mom notices this before her friend does. Her eyes dart around the room, looking for something, anything, to entertain Jack with. Coming up short, my mom grabs the closest thing that was on the table: a key. I think it unlocked one of the older cabinets we had lying around back then so it was very nondescript and boring; it didn’t have any patterns on it, or engravings, and it certainly wasn’t imbued with ancient magic of any kind.</p>
<p>But my mom gets down to Jack’s level and hijacks his attention with the key. She twirls it between her fingers and Jack’s eyes expand to the size of saucers.</p>
<p>My mom whispers in his ear.</p>
<p>“This key opens a door somewhere in our home,” her hand outstretched, sweeps across the air as if our house was a castle in the Scottish highlands, a scary and adventurous place that little Jack might get lost in. “And this very special key opens a very special door. So, Jack…” My mom pauses for emphasis “…you’re the only one that can help me find it.”</p>
<p>At this point all of Jack’s boredom had been converted into pure, unbridled excitement and his smile almost hopped off his round face in the rush of this new adventure. He spent the rest of the afternoon darting around the house trying the key on everything; on books and chairs, walls and fireplaces, and even his mother’s poor knee.</p>
<hr />
<p>I didn’t realize this until I was an adult but when I was a young kid my family went bankrupt and my father’s successful business disappeared almost over night. Our small family, just my dad, my mom, my brother and me, lost everything. Our grandparents died and we’d been ostracized from cousins, sisters and distant brothers before I was born and so there was no-one to call for backup.</p>
<p>After my dad finally relented in telling us the details decades later I remembered that for years my brother and I had slept on the floor without a mattress. We didn’t have wallpaper. We had no toys or even a television until we were much older.</p>
<p>Whilst my dad was throwing himself into the maw of tax collectors and shady debt men, my mom was left dealing with two young children almost entirely alone. And so she learned quickly how to entertain us on a budget. Without any money to pay for toys my mom had to make the ordinary extraordinary. Our empty bedroom became a jungle, the couch a train, the stairway a place where Pokémon could be found and fought. And yes, even boring nondescript keys became potent with magic and prophesy.</p>
<p>That unbound excitement in boring things, that sort of curiosity in the world around us is what we so desperately need more of. We need excuses to play, to experiment, to dream during the daytime. And I think it was that key that my mother held in her hand that afternoon that made me want to be a writer and a designer. It’s what ultimately sparked my curiosity in typography, letters, and writing as well because I knew that I wanted to give others that feeling of infinite hope and that sense of wonder, too.</p>
<p>This is most certainly going to be a non-sequitur but for some reason all of this reminds me of Mary Reufle’s <em>Madness, Rack and Honey</em> where the poet describes what the perfect English Literature class in a highschool might look like. In the book, Mary writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My idea for a class is you just sit in the classroom and read aloud until everyone is smiling, and then you look around, and if someone is not smiling you ask them why, and then you keep reading—it may take many different books—until they start smiling, too.</p>
</blockquote>
The Ends of the World2018-07-08T03:56:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-ends-of-the-world/<p>In this non-fiction account of the last five apolayptic scenarios our planet has endured, Peter Brannen writes in lucid detail in <em>The Ends of the World</em> about what led to each of them and, potentially, how we might be entering a new apocalypse of our own making.</p>
<p>The Odorvician, Devonian, and Permian mass extinctions, where more than 80% of all species were annihilated, share some common themes, according to Brannen. First, it’s almost never a single event that kills off a species or causes mass extinctions. Second, these events are attributable to our biosphere’s relationship with carbon dioxide. Whether that’s giant trees that caused one of the first ice ages, or whether it was a Russia-sized volcano that almost ended life on earth, it’s the world’s relationship with carbon dioxide that’s paramount to keeping the biosphere in balance.</p>
<p>One of my favorite notes that Brannen consistently makes is how the world as we know it is temporary, fluid, adaptable:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We take for granted the shape of our world and the position of the continents—the familiar geography that seems as eternal as the order of the planets. But this arrangment is temporary: it isn’t how the planet has been and it isn’t how it will be. This ever-shifting world map has major implications, far beyond cartography. The accidental orientation of the continents has a profound influence on life.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Another fascinating point that Brannen makes (of which there are really too many to count) is when he describes how large areas of research are underfunded and unspoken of because of how unsexy they are, rather than as to how interesting and useful the science might be:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When the listless <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brachiopod">brachiopod</a> is compared to a dinosaur, an animal whose blockbuster appeal is immediately apparent, the retort is quick from those who study marine invertebrates of the sort that mucked about in the prehistoric seas: anyone can love a dinosaur, but it takes a true diehard to appreciate the life—if one can call it that—of a brachiopod.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This book has been swimming around in my thoughts for the past week as I’ve been reading it and it’s ended up in almost every conversation, too.</p>
<p>Earlier today I headed over to Emeryville to grab coffee with <a href="https://twitter.com/vruba">Charlie Loyd</a>, inventor of one of my favorite websites <a href="http://glittering.blue/">glittering.blue</a> (I’d recommend loading that one in Safari on a desktop if I were you because oh boy it’s a big website). Although he doesn’t seem to publish much, I think Charlie is one of my favorite writers on the “climate crisis”, as he described it, and the barrage of problems we’ll be shortly facing if we don’t dramatically change gears economically and politically.</p>
<p>We talked for a couple of hours and at one point he dryly said that “eventually humans will be living in a sustainable way.” Implying of course that we get to do that the easy way (we change our economic policies to prevent an apocalypse in the future) or the hard way (we don’t do anything and our species potentially goes extinct or so many of us are destroyed that the rest get to live happy lives without us).</p>
<p>The conversation was fascinating, but towards the end I asked him how he feels about this stuff. About Climate Change. The Big Double C. And he looked out at the rest of the café – all of a sudden I was aware of the electricity pulsing through the walls and the jukebox and all of the materials that had been dug up so we could talk and drink comfortably, the sheer weight of hundreds of years of pillage and plunder of our world just so that we could share a few moments together like this – and he held the pause another long second, thinking.</p>
<p>Suddenly he said that he wanted to make the climate crisis “an enemy rather than an anxiety.” This is a thing that needs to be fought, to be beaten. The climate crisis is not a puzzle – there are people in the way. Enormous economic and social policies need to change for us to continue as a species. For us to live here, happily, soaking up the Emeryville sun and drinking coffee.</p>
An Archipelago Man2018-06-23T20:52:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/an-archipeligo-man/<p>Back in 2012 Matt Taibbi wrote this incredible piece about <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829">who Mitt Romney is</a> and his revolutionary political aspirations. The whole piece is both infuriating and terrifying:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Forget about the Southern strategy, blue versus red, swing states and swing voters – all of those political clichés are quaint relics of a less threatening era that is now part of our past, or soon will be. The next conflict defining us all is much more unnerving.</p>
<p>That conflict will be between people who live somewhere, and people who live nowhere. It will be between people who consider themselves citizens of actual countries, to which they have patriotic allegiance, and people to whom nations are meaningless, who live in a stateless global archipelago of privilege – a collection of private schools, tax havens and gated residential communities with little or no connection to the outside world.</p>
<p>Mitt Romney isn't blue or red. He’s an archipelago man.</p>
</blockquote>
I Don’t Believe in Full-Stack Engineering2018-06-20T02:45:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/i-dont-believe-in-full-stack-engineering/<p>There, I said it. Of all the engineers I’ve met over the years only one has come close to what that title, <em>full-stack engineer</em>, implies: the ability to easily navigate the back-end and front-end with a senior level of expertise. For the rest of us though, it’s simply not possible to do both.</p>
<p>But hold up a sec, what is front-end development? Well I believe that this line of work contains the following skills:</p>
<ul>
<li>Semantic, accessible markup (writing in a sea of spans and divs should make them uncomfortable)</li>
<li>Experience of writing clear and concise Sass/CSS (they should fully appreciate the benefits and risks of the cascade)</li>
<li>Caring deeply, even obsessively, about web performance (so that means knowledge of font loading, images, SVGs, animations, auditing third party scripts etc.)</li>
<li>And depending on the size of the org or project, a deep knowledge of React/Angular/whatever in order to make abstract components that can be constantly reused by different teams.</li>
</ul>
<p>Yes, learning these skills is possible if you’re an engineer. But doing them well? Heck, doing them to even an acceptable standard? This line of work requires above all else dedication and focus because yesterday’s hack becomes today’s standard and you simply don’t have time to keep up with front-end development if it’s a side gig.</p>
<p>But I see bad design <em>everywhere</em> on the web and I reckon it’s because of this lack of skills — not necessarily because designers are ill equipped for the task at hand or even that engineers are ignorant of web standards and usability or performance issues. It’s because there’s a whole spectrum of web development skills that are being left entirely ignored and pushed aside by the folks that are making hiring decisions at these organizations.</p>
<p>I think this apathy towards front-end development comes from a lot of different places though. HTML and CSS and JavaScript have always been looked down upon by many engineers for their quirks. When they see a confusing and haphazardly implemented API across browsers (HTML/CSS/JS), I see a swarming, writhing, and constantly improving interface that means we can read stuff that was written fifteen years ago and our browsers can still parse it.</p>
<p>Maybe us web developers and designers share part in the blame, too:</p>
<div class="cell-b20">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">If we spent as much time thinking about users as we do about the titles we give front-end developers then the web would be a much better place.</p>— Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) <a href="https://twitter.com/robinrendle/status/1006561797145440256?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">June 12, 2018</a></blockquote>
</div>
<p>It’s sort of frustrating to see a line of work that’s still vital to the health of the web, and the financial stakes of those companies that don’t really care about this stuff, and it’s sad to see developers rename their titles every six months so that they can get more prestige for their LinkedIn profiles.</p>
<p>Front-end development is important today and it will be important in twenty years’ time, it’s not going away anytime soon. It’s always going to be about as cool and as boring as it is today so putting everything in JavaScript and changing your job description won’t change that. It’ll just lead to even more confusion about what front-end development even is.</p>
<p>Not only that but I see a lot of tools and processes trying to replace front-end development and sometimes that replacement comes under the guise of Design Systems tools. A lot of prototyping and design apps seem to shout from the heavens: “Designers! Give this mockup to an engineer and all they have to do is copy and paste the CSS! It’s literally impossible to screw this up!”</p>
<p>Humbug, I say!</p>
<p>Every company that ignores front-end development is doing so at their own peril; they’ll lose <a href="https://wpostats.com/">millions of dollars every year</a> because their websites are slow, they’ll <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-face-lawsuits-over-website-accessibility-for-blind-users-1478005201">be sued</a> for violating accessibility laws, and they won’t be able to ship beautiful, high-quality and well-organized interfaces because no-one will be there to build them.</p>
<p>Despite the evidence that front-end development is a focused activity that requires full-time effort I see a lot of companies hiring full-stack engineers and hiring designers without coding experience, and I see design teams focused intently on pixel pushing and making animations without understanding basic HTML structure. I constantly see wildly inaccessible interfaces that don’t have focus states and forms that don’t let you navigate effectively with a keyboard. I see unusable mobile interfaces and giant web apps that feel slow and clunky because no-one really considered how browsers function at the most basic of levels.</p>
<p>If you’re only hiring full-stack engineers then you should carefully consider why that’s the case and you should have a grasp of what you’re sacrificing for that lack of focus and expertise in that area.</p>
<p>Because there’s no such thing as a unicorn and there’s no such thing as a full-stack engineer.</p>
How Long Can Our Content Last?2018-06-14T04:58:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/how-long-can-our-content-last/<p><a href="https://www.zachleat.com/web/digital-longevity/">Zach Leatherman</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We may be trapped in a web of competing formats, open and closed, standardized and proprietary, single vendor controlled and community driven, available for all and tightly held in app stores and behind walled gardens. We’re trapped in a continuum of open and closed continuously exploited for profit that plays a huge role in the longevity of our digital files.</p>
<p>Digital content longevity will continue to be highly variable, depending only in part on the file format used. HTML has existed for about 27 years and I wouldn’t venture a guess to say how much longer it’ll go. I can say that a reduction in ceremony around opening and reading a file is better for that file’s longevity. Relatedly, the ubiquity of software necessary to read a file lends to its future proofing as well. And what software has been historically and continues to be more ubiquitous than the lowly web browser? I’m not sure such software exists.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I think about this stuff <em>a lot</em> (just Inspect Element on this here page) but I’m of two minds when it comes to preservation on the web and from day to day I fluctuate between pessimism and optimism. Some days I feel like I’ll be writing HTML and CSS until I retire – I might not be using macOS or even a keyboard or screen to do that, but under the hood it’ll still be HTML and CSS. This feeling becomes more profound when I mess around with Electron and then it’s obvious that <em>everything</em> will be built with HTML, CSS and JavaScript—it’s only a matter of time before we website-ize everything and make those technologies truly ubiquitous.</p>
<p>But then I think beyond the languages of the web and get all sour when I think about <a href="https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2015/05/25/URI-decay">link rot</a>. Even some of the older projects here are breaking up already, like <a href="https://robinrendle.com/essays/new-web-typography/">The New Web Typography</a>. The first thing to stop working was the fonts. Then one day the JavaScript for some of the examples stopped working.</p>
<p>It’s fascinating in fact, watching this enormous project that I cared so much for fade away back into hypertext. And maybe that’s okay. Maybe one day everything on that page will return to a state of nothing but HTML tags. And maybe it’ll stick around for a while after I’m gone, too.</p>
<p>But the biggest flaw with all this digital preservation stuff isn’t HTML or CSS in my opinion. <em>It’s the concept of a domain that we rent.</em> Today we borrow spaces on the web and put up our flimsy little flags on top. And then the links get lost in a shuffle between apartments or jobs, between marriages or administrations. Or when someone accidentally unplugs something. Or, tragically, if someone dies.</p>
<p>Above all things it’s not the languages of the web we should be worried about when it comes to digital preservation. Instead, it’s the pact we sign when renting a space on the web for money – that’s the least resilient part of the whole deal.</p>
<p>And it’s what scares me the most.</p>
Bourdain2018-06-13T04:36:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/bourdain/<p>Over the past week a lot of friends have shared this story by Anthony Bourdain, supposedly his first published piece, called <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/04/19/dont-eat-before-reading-this">Don’t Eat Before Reading This</a> and in true Bourdainian style it’s lovely as all hell:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I love the sheer weirdness of the kitchen life: the dreamers, the crackpots, the refugees, and the sociopaths with whom I continue to work; the ever-present smells of roasting bones, searing fish, and simmering liquids; the noise and clatter, the hiss and spray, the flames, the smoke, and the steam. Admittedly, it’s a life that grinds you down. Most of us who live and operate in the culinary underworld are in some fundamental way dysfunctional. We’ve all chosen to turn our backs on the nine-to-five, on ever having a Friday or Saturday night off, on ever having a normal relationship with a non-cook.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When I heard news of Bourdain’s death I gasped because it’s inconceivable to me that we’ll never hear his voice again. And what a voice it was; one that loved a good list and always had a crackling, romantic metaphor ready at hand. But regardless of the voice or familiar face that we’ll surely miss it’s clear now that amongst everything else it was his kindness that will be the most shocking loss. <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/juliareinstein/marilyn-hagerty-anthony-bourdain-olive-garden?utm_term=.vbMGqEMeDM#.qgRKpR1MW1">He stood up for people</a> when he didn’t have to. He didn’t <a href="https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-us/magazine/money-diary-anthony-bourdain">dodge his taxes</a>. He despised <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-gastronomy/a-harvey-weinstein-moment-for-the-restaurant-industry">bro culture</a>. He was <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-gastronomy/anthony-bourdain-and-the-power-of-telling-the-truth">a feminist and handled fame with grace</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Bourdain’s fame wasn’t the distant, lacquered type of an actor or a musician, bundled and sold with a life-style newsletter. Bourdain felt like your brother, your rad uncle, your impossibly cool dad—your realest, smartest friend, who wandered outside after beers at the local one night and ended up in front of some TV cameras and decided to stay there. As a writer himself, he was always looking out for other writers, always saying yes, always available for interviews and comments. You had to fight through a wall of skeptical P.R. to get to someone like Guy Fieri, but Bourdain was right there, for everyone, in equal measure. He remembered names. He took every question seriously. He was twenty minutes early to every appointment, to the minute. Every newspaper, every magazine, every Web site that asked got its Bourdain quotes—and good ones, too! Not pre-scripted pablum but potent missiles of cultural commentary—bombastic wisdom, grand pronouncements, eviscerations of celebrities, flagrantly named names.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Far beyond the cooking and the jokes, the suave bad boy attitude with the good heart, it’s “being there, for everyone, in equal measure” – that’s what we can learn from Anthony Bourdain and it’s how we ought to spend the rest of our time here together, aspiring to be there for everyone.</p>
On Beauty2018-06-12T04:13:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/on-beauty/<p>I had coffee with an internet friend the other day for the first time and I asked her what she was reading. She immediately started talking about a book set in Texas that she had fallen completely in love with but couldn’t recommend because it was written for people from Texas. There was something that was impossible to translate for anyone else and to be honest I huffed and puffed – what’s so special about Texas I thought.</p>
<p>With that said I’ve been reading <em>On Beauty</em> by Zadie Smith this past week and I feel the same way. A large part of the novel is about England and the way characters feel pulled and pushed by the random magnetism of the place.</p>
<p>There were many moments where I had to stop reading because it was too much to find my thoughts and feelings about a place I should call home, but don’t and never will, bundled up in a book. And so <em>On Beauty</em> is this wonderfully painful novel for me which I don’t think I can recommend for the same reasons as my Texan friend and her book, unless of course you happen to be English and you’ve decided to live on the other side of the world and you feel horrendously guilty about it all and dread the thought of returning each and every time and yet somehow dread the thought of leaving once you’re there.</p>
<p>Anyway! I ramble. The reason why I bring it up is because the cover has this rather beautiful set of characters – I can’t quite tell whether they’re hand lettered or the work of an insanely dedicated and now entirely bankrupted type foundry. But they’re lovely all the same:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/unnamed.jpg" alt="unnamed.jpg" /></p>
<p>Actually my pal James Lindeman just informed me that indeed this is a typeface, aptly named <a href="https://www.a2-type.co.uk/zadie">Zadie</a> and it was designed by A2-Type, a London based type foundry. The specimens sure are lovely, too:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/zadie-reference_1.jpg" alt="zadie-reference_1.jpg" /></p>
<p>Check out those two capital A variants! And the H! The H!</p>
11am2018-06-10T08:31:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/11am/<p>I was in a meeting the other day and it dawned on me that it would be much easier to get through it if I was drunk. The conversation was a little too slow, both of us seemed to push and pull our way through the meeting as neither of us really wanted to be there – he was clearly bored and I felt that I could anticipate everything he was about to say five minutes before he said it. I distinctly remember trying to pay attention to him as I fought the urge to fetch a few beers from the office kitchen.</p>
<p>It was, horrifyingly, only 11am.</p>
<p>This feeling of wanting to be drunk and making excuses to drink doesn’t happen often but it reminded me that I’ve always had a strange, even dangerous relationship with alcohol. There was a moment in college when I went to a small gathering on a Tuesday evening at the beginning of the year — it was held at the campus canteen and over an hour or so into the shindig I had gotten wildly, embarrassingly drunk. You know that point where you’re sober enough to realize you’re drunk and that you’ve made a horrible mistake? Well, I had that feeling and as I looked around the room the shock set in: not only was I the only person that was drunk, even worse; I was the only person that had been drinking in the first place.</p>
<p>Two weeks ago I also noticed that without really planning to I had turned up to a date an hour early. I’m almost never early for anything (I worry that I’m notorious for my lateness in fact). Halfway through the date I discovered why I’d been eager to get there so early though; it was so I could get loosened up with a drink before she arrived. And I was relieved that I had, because a few sips into the third beer and all the anxiety blurred away into the background. With another beer thrown in on top the locks would disengage and I knew I could be charming and funny and sweet without having to try so damn hard all the time. I wouldn’t have to worry about the million things I was worrying about earlier that day; my visa, whether she thought I was attractive or not, my concerns at work, my green card application, my health concerns, me moving away from San Fransisco at some point soon, and worst of all; whether she thought I was funny.</p>
<p>If I’m really honest then I have to admit that this same feeling struck me again on Friday evening, too. And it’s weird because I had such a lovely day – my work had been presented to the whole company and I received several compliments from the other designers. Next, I headed to a friend’s house and we played a D&D sort of game with a new gang of pals and so I was extraodinarily happy, smiles piled in on top of one another. And yet I still wanted to drink throughout the whole thing. When I returned home later that evening I was sad that I didn’t have that alcoholic buzz of success after a good night out and I had to sit there by myself instead, sober.</p>
<p>Yes, with my friends that evening I wanted to drink but not because I wanted to be drunk. It was a little more complicated than that. As the evening rolled past and our talking quickly turned into laughter and then tears because we were laughing so hard, in the back of my mind I still wanted to hide in the bathroom and drink a whole bottle of wine to…well…</p>
<p>It’s awful to admit this but it’s true: I knew that if I could get one more drink in me then I could finally be myself.</p>
Gardens and Systems2018-06-06T05:03:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/gardens-and-systems/<p>The other day I read Jenny Odell’s piece about <a href="https://medium.com/@the_jennitaur/how-to-do-nothing-57e100f59bbb">how to do nothing</a> – it’s all about the value of free, public spaces like gardens – and since then I’ve been mulling over this part especially:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>…those spaces which are not seen as commercially productive are always under threat, since what they “produce” can’t be measured or exploited or even easily identified — despite the fact that anyone in the neighborhood can tell you what an immense value the garden provides.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Perhaps this is my own lunacy and obsession at work here but I couldn’t help make the comparison to design systems, too. A design team’s component library is a garden, a public space, and all features and products are a threat to destabilize the community’s shared environment.</p>
<p>Okay I’m going to go to bed now and pretend I didn’t type this GOODNIGHT, SIR.</p>
AMPstinction2018-06-05T03:27:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/ampstinction/<p>I love what Jeremy has to say here about <a href="https://adactio.com/journal/13964">frameworks and the web</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’ve come to believe that the goal of any good framework should be to make itself unnecessary</p>
</blockquote>
<p>...and how that ultimately relates to <a href="https://developers.google.com/amp/">the AMP project</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If the AMP project existed in order to create a web where AMP was no longer needed, I think I could get behind it. But the more it’s positioned as the only viable solution to solving performance, the more uncomfortable I am with it.</p>
<p>Which, by the way, brings me to one of the most pernicious ideas around Google AMP—positioning anyone opposed to it as not caring about web performance. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s precisely because performance on the web is so important that it deserves a long-term solution, co-created by all of us: not some commandments delivered to us from on-high by one organisation, enforced by preferential treatment by that organisation’s monopoly in search.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>My hot take on this? Sometimes I think Google (the company) knows precisely what they’re doing and they hide their intent beneath obfuscation because they don’t quite want to say “We want to own the whole damn thing. We want search, we want maps, and we want to eat your website, too.” However, I think that Google (the developers working on AMP) all truly believe that their work fixes the serious performance issues on the web.</p>
<p>But then again maybe all of this is sort of like Flash. There’s a great chat between <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvLF7zllsv0">Bruce Lawson and Mustafa Kurtuldu</a> where they discuss how, yes, Adobe Flash was a nightmare for the web and yet at the same time it encouraged the web standards movement like nothing else before it. Flash showed us all that the web can be so much more than just a place to store some hypertext, that ultimately it can be anything we want it to be.</p>
<p>And so whenever I look at AMP I wonder whether the technology and process itself might be bad (which is arguable) but the efforts might lead to something longer lasting, another movement inspired because of it, despite it, a movement that we can all benefit from.</p>
Yay Computers2018-05-30T03:01:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/yay-computers/<p>Here’s a note I made in the most recent CSS-Tricks Newsletter which, yes, you absolutely should <a href="https://css-tricks.com/newsletters/">sign up</a> to as quickly as humanly possible. We take the latest and greatest news from the web design community and deliver it straight to your inbox every week.</p>
<hr />
<p>This holiday weekend I’ve been learning how to make Twitter bots and I’ve been having a blast. In fact I can’t remember the last time I had this much fun programming and doing stuff with computers. The bot is a simple little jokey thing but making the bot’s not really the point to be honest, it’s all about confidence building and being bad at stuff for long enough to get good at it.</p>
<p>It’s been one of those rare moments where I’ve had lots to learn in a short period of time: figuring out the basics of node, learning how to use npm modules within an app, tinkering with requests in an API and figuring out how to plot coordinates in an SVG chart as well as figuring out what the heck a CRON job is. The reason why it’s been a blast though isn’t necessarily because I’m now the smartest human being alive and feel completely invulnerable to the passage of time, although that certainly does has something to do with it, but the reason why I’m so excited about all this stuff is really because of the community I found along the way.</p>
<p>It’s buck wild to have so many helpful resources available to help us at any given moment: from blog posts and books to random node.js conference talks that only have 8 views and 7 of them are now mine. So I think this weekend has reinforced my faith in blogging and sharing what you know, where random notes left on some developer’s old blog have helped me tremendously.</p>
<p>Anywho, on a similar note, I’ve been thinking a bunch about how social networks prioritize fame over value. If you publish something on Medium for example and it only gets a single clap then it makes you feel like, <em>why bother?</em> What’s the point if no-one’s reading this thing? But I think we have to fight that inclination to be woo’d with fame and social-network notoriety because I wonder how many helpful blog posts and videos weren’t made simply because someone thought they weren’t going to get half a million likes or retweets from it.</p>
<p>My advice after learning from so many helpful people this weekend is this: if you’re thinking of writing something that explains a weird thing you struggled with on the Internet, do it! Don’t worry about the views and likes and Internet hugs. If you’ve struggled with figuring out this thing then be sure to jot it down, even if it’s unedited and it uses too many commas and you don’t like the tone of it.</p>
<p>That’s because someone like me is bound to find what you’ve written and it’ll make their whole weekend a lot less stressful than it could’ve been.</p>
Good Writing and Analytics Don’t Mix2018-05-23T03:44:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/good-writing-and-analytics-dont-mix/<p>If you want to be a good writer then you can’t worry about the numbers. The stats, the dashboards, the faves, likes, hearts and yes, even the claps, they all lead to madness and, worst of all in my opinion, bad writing.</p>
<p>To become a good writer you need to get comfortable without third party scripts on your website, by looking away from the statistics, and returning to your keyboard. This is certainly much easier to say than do in my experience as it’s tough to ignore the data when everything feels so much more scientific and insightful with them in hand. But the data is a damn lie I tell you, it’s the writer’s equivalent of a pacifier.</p>
<p>Sure, having a vague sense of the traffic of your website is fine and dandy yet when you’re looking at one post and comparing that to the likes and faves of another then I think that’s where things get troublesome. For example, having a sense of roughly how many readers a month check your website is great, yet trying to figure out precisely why this one post on this one topic did better than another just isn’t healthy for us as writers. We shouldn’t let those sorts of analytics encourage us to change the way we write and we should reclassify analytics like this as being rather dangerous.</p>
<p>Side note: this has me wishing for a dial on Twitter where we could switch off all the likes and retweets and mentions for a moment and breathe fresh air once again. I reckon Twitter would become a better place, a quiet place, for good writing to bloom once again.</p>
<p>Either way, to become good writers we have to think about structure, composition, kindness, sentences, clauses, arguments dressed with punctuation. But instead of trusting the data from surveillance state web advertising companies we must ignore them all and return first and foremost to trusting our keyboards.</p>
backdrop-filter2018-05-20T06:57:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/backdrop-filter/<p>I wrote a quick thing the other day for CSS-Tricks all about <a href="https://css-tricks.com/the-backdrop-filter-css-property/">the <code>backdrop-filter</code> CSS property</a> which, although not particularly well supported today, highlights just how powerful CSS is becoming. <code>backdrop-filter</code> allows us to add a filter to the background of an element such as blurring it or changing its saturation without changing the styles of the content.</p>
<p>Here’s one demo I made where you can see all the different types of backdrop side by side:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/backdrop.gif" alt="backdrop.gif" /></p>
<p>Combine this with the <a href="https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/f/filter/">filter</a> and <a href="https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/m/mix-blend-mode/">mix-blend-mode</a> properties and we’ll soon have a bonafide Photoshop in the browser.</p>
How to Take Criticism2018-05-17T06:52:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/how-to-take-criticism/<p>I love this piece by Chappell Ellison so much; she looks at <a href="http://chappellellison.com/giving-and-taking-criticism">design criticism from a different point of view</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Universities teach you how to give criticism. They’ve been doing it for centuries. They supply all sorts of texts so that you can cough up fancy words and names to support your argument.</p>
<p>But the thing is, no one teaches you how to take criticism. This is ridiculous. It’s like teaching construction workers about nuts and not bolts.</p>
<p>As it turns out, it’s really hard to teach people how to take criticism.</p>
<p>That’s because everyone is human and naturally defensive and very sensitive and we all have a secret emotional space where we’re in a constant state of LOL/#RIP and we’re all maybe dying a little inside but that’s okay here’s a gif of cat dressed as a pirate.</p>
</blockquote>
I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye2018-05-12T07:20:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/im-not-black-im-kanye/<p>A wonderful new piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/05/im-not-black-im-kanye/559763/">on Kanye West, Michael Jackson, and celebrity</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...[Kanye] is a god, though one born of a different time and a different need. Jackson rose in the last days of enigma and wonder; West, in an accessible age, when every fuck is a tweet and every defecation a status update. And perhaps, in that way, West has done something more remarkable, more amazing than Jackson, because he is a man of no mystery, overexposed, who holds the world’s attention through simply the consistent, amazing, near-peerless quality of his work.</p>
</blockquote>
To Oregon!2018-05-12T03:50:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/road-trip/<p>I took a little time off last week and for a couple of days I headed up to Oregon on my bike. Together we drove through swooping valleys and up into snow-capped mountains, around twisty rock faces and great empty plains; every moment was thoroughly breathtaking. Although I didn’t take pictures of the most memorable moments, here are some of the highlights that I did manage to snap:</p>
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<img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/1.jpg" />
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<img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/2.jpg" />
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<img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/3.jpg" />
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<img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/4.jpg" />
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<img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/5.jpg" />
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Leaving Facebook2018-05-07T03:24:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/leaving-facebook/<p>For years I lived happily without a Facebook account and it was only in 2016 that I finally signed up after wanting to experiment more with Messenger for an upcoming hiking trip with some friends. Recently though I’ve considered leaving Facebook, for a variety of reasons, and returning home to the dark rock that I once lived under but unfortunately I don’t think that’s entirely possible today. Too much of my real life social network is tied up with it. So I heartily agree with everything that Sarah Jeong writes about in this piece about <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/28/17293056/facebook-deletefacebook-social-network-monopoly">leaving Facebook</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Facebook had replaced much of the emotional labor of social networking that consumed previous generations. We have forgotten (or perhaps never noticed) how many hours our parents spent keeping their address books up to date, knocking on doors to make sure everyone in the neighborhood was invited to the weekend BBQ, doing the rounds of phone calls with relatives, clipping out interesting newspaper articles and mailing them to a friend, putting together the cards for Valentine’s Day, Easter, Christmas, and more. We don’t think about what it’s like to carefully file business cards alphabetically in a Rolodex. People spent a lot of time on these sorts of things, once, because the less of that work you did, the less of a social network you had.</p>
<p>Facebook lets me be lazy the way a man in a stereotypical 1950s office can be lazy. Facebook is the digital equivalent of my secretary, or perhaps my wife, yelling at me not to forget to wish someone a happy birthday, or to inform me I have a social engagement this evening. If someone is on Facebook, I have a direct line to them right away — as though a switchboard operator has already put them on Line 1 for me. Facebook is one step away from buying my kids their Christmas presents because I’m too busy to choose them.</p>
<p>Facebook turns a necessary labor of love into a profitable business.</p>
</blockquote>
Email is the Magic Key2018-05-07T01:48:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/email-is-the-magic-key/<p>I got to reading this excellent post called <a href="https://thecreativeindependent.com/guides/how-to-make-a-book/">How to Make a Book</a> the other day and it’s a collection of advice from writers and novelists about how to get started with a book of your own:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A book can be inspired by nearly anything: a seemingly stray thought you can’t shake, a lyric, an overheard conversation, another book. Whatever it is, turn it over again and again and again in your mind. Watch it. Listen to it. Be skeptical of it. Let it bother you. Most importantly, take notes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I particularly liked Robin Sloan’s advice in this post where he writes a tiny love letter to email:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Of all the followings you can accrue—on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and platforms yet to be invented—one is more important than the rest by an order of magnitude. It’s the group of people who have given you their old-fashioned email addresses and agreed that they would, from time to time, like to hear from you. Even if no one quite loves their inbox, everyone has one. Across generations and geography, through digital fads and fascinations, email is the common denominator, the magic key.</p>
<p>Email lists grow slowly, but their growth is sturdier than social networks. It’s exciting to see the sharp little bursts of attention on the social networks when something you write takes off. But it’s easy come, easy go; as quickly as attention finds you, it moves on, eager for the next thing. Email lists are sturdier and stickier. There is a real sense, you’ll find, of building them one person at a time.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s weird to think that it’s 2018 and I spend pretty much my entire weekend writing email, what with <a href="https://buttondown.email/robinrendle">Adventures</a> and the <a href="http://css-tricks.com/newsletter">CSS-Tricks newsletter</a>, and so I have to concur with the other Robin on their value and utility here.</p>
<p>Although! Both of these groups have a sizable audience now yet there’s something a little detached from writing them that I still find unnerving. I think perhaps because there’s no immediate buzz of the likes/faves/hearts/retweets and there’s no casino-like thrill after you hit the publish button. After an email goes out there’s often nothing but radio silence from the other side and then I begin to worry for half a second whether anybody is reading them at all. I probably just have to remember that every social network has been training me as a writer, for the better part of a decade now, to be dependent on those likes and faves and retweets for my emotional well-being. There’s too much of my self-esteem locked up in social networks and not everything I write ought to stir people off their seats or bring them to tears.</p>
<p>Anyway, Robin’s advice about email reminded me of Chris Coyier’s ever-so-excellent micro-blog called <a href="http://email-is-good.com/">Email is good</a> where he collects all of this thoughts about why email is a lovely, wondrous, and utterly frustrating thing. Chris writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Email is a big deal. Yet almost everyone I know struggles with it.</p>
<p>That’s what this site is all about. Let’s talk about email. Let’s figure out what’s hard about it and where the struggles are, so that all the great parts of email shine even brighter. Success in today’s world, in almost any way you want to define that, is going to involve you being good at email. So let’s get good at email.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Hear, hear.</p>
Seven Days in the Life of the Late, Great John McCain2018-04-30T18:21:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/seven-days-in-the-life-of-the-late-great-john-mccain/<p>David Foster Wallace wrote a wonderful piece on <a href="https://kottke.org/18/04/david-foster-wallace-on-john-mccains-2000-presidential-campaign">the campaign trail</a> of John McCain back in 2000. He describes the way that we’ve been hurt by politics and how that creates a sense of listlessness and ennui:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s ultimately just about that complicated: it hurts. We learn this at like age four – it’s grownups’ first explanation to us of why it’s bad to lie (“How would you like it if … ?”). And we keep learning for years, from hard experience, that getting lied to sucks – that it diminishes you, denies you respect for yourself, for the liar, for the world.</p>
<p>[...] So who wouldn’t yawn and turn away, trade apathy and cynicism for the hurt of getting treated with contempt? And who wouldn’t fall all over themselves for a top politician who actually seemed to talk to you like you were a person, an intelligent adult worthy of respect? A politician who all of a sudden out of nowhere comes on TV as this total long-shot candidate and says that Washington is paralyzed, that everybody there’s been bought off, and that the only way to really “return government to the people” as all the other candidates claim they want to do is to outlaw huge unreported political contributions from corporations and lobbies and PACs … all of which are obvious truths that everybody knows but no recent politician anywhere’s had the stones to say.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Via <a href="https://kottke.org/18/04/david-foster-wallace-on-john-mccains-2000-presidential-campaign">Kottke</a>.</p>
A City of Letters2018-04-26T22:51:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/a-city-of-letters/<p>First you notice the city. San Francisco from 30,000 feet is a tiny holdout at the very tip of a cloudy peninsula. As you begin to descend you’ll see bridges and ocean, mountains and hills, as well as a patchwork quilt of skyscrapers at the northernmost tip.</p>
<p>But from this height it’s still a city, just like the others.</p>
<p>Whilst the plane continues to slowly dip through the clouds you’ll catch glimpses of landmarks just like a lens slowly bending the light into its focus. Do you see the Coit tower? Can you spot the buffalo in the park or the decorated trams yet? Perhaps you’re flying into the city at night, where you’ll see the dim and orange glowing hum of the Golden Gate bridge or maybe instead its neighbor, the bridge that heads north-east towards Oakland, where at dusk you can find its lights shimmering as if it was an elaborate string of loosely bound pearls in the dark.</p>
<p>However this peninsula is much more than objects and faces and bridges; when you find yourself on firm ground once again make sure to shake off the flight with a hike through the city. But most importantly, as you’re hiking around, make sure to tilt your head to the left from time to time. And now, a little to the right.</p>
<p>You’ll see it quickly, I promise. A city of letters will rise out of the city of San Francisco with towering, hand-lettered numbers alongside defiant, picturesque characters appearing from nearby signs and walls where before there were only blurry squiggles. You’ll find yourself surrounded by a city fit for Italo Calvino where an alphabet of each and every kind will be proudly standing on display. Every corner will be the host of some new shape or style of letter welcoming you to this new city for the first time. Here! Take the sign behind you: that squiggle of letters indicates a new district, a new idea, an alternative way of living your life.</p>
<p>At this point I’m afraid it’s far too late for you though. Try as hard as you might, you won’t be able to stop looking at the letters. You’ll forever be staring at them and now that you see that city of letters beneath the city of San Francisco itself, that once real city, will flicker and fade into the background.</p>
<p>But quite frankly, you won’t ever want to return.</p>
Jagannath2018-04-24T04:11:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/jagannath/<p>Karin Tidbeck’s <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Jagannath-Karin-Tidbeck/dp/1101973978/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=H7AGDWEVX50ZK53AC51K">Jagannath</a> is a collection of stories that I’ve been utterly obsessed with over the last couple of weeks. Although it’s a small book, I’ve been ever so slowly chewing on each and every story because I don’t want it to end.</p>
<p>One of the more extraordinary things about the book however is that Karin translated this collection of stories from her native Swedish into English herself and at the very end of the book she describes what that experience was like:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Writing in Swedish and English are two very different experiences. Your native language resonates in your bones. Each spoken word reaffirms or changes the world as you see it, intellectually and emotionally. Because Swedish is my mother tongue, I can take enormous liberties with it because I know exactly and instinctively how it works. English doesn’t quite allow itself to be grabbed by the scruff of the neck in the same way. As a result, I’m more careful with the prose, perhaps less adventurous, because without that gut reaction it’s hard to know exactly how something will resonate with an English-speaking reader. On the other hand, I may find paths into English that a native speaker might not, because there are aspects of your native tongue that you just don’t see, since you are standing in the middle of it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The book is really a collection of fables rather than stories and each of them contains that scary magic I remember when I read books as a child; places unimaginable, with landscapes occupied by monsters too terrifying to describe. Instead of being frightening or moody though the stories somehow leave you with a feeling of awe and wonder that something so weird could be written on a page.</p>
The Three Body Problem2018-04-22T23:21:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-three-body-problem/<p>Liu Cixin’s <em>Three Body Problem</em> is one of the strangest things I’ve ever read. It’s a sci-fi novel set during the throes of the Cultural Revolution and focuses on a Chinese researcher who makes contact with an alien civilization. It’s the sort of topic that’s been partly written about to death, however! Liu’s book is altogether different because it makes sci-fi truly weird again.</p>
<p>I really don’t want to describe too much of it because it’ll spoil the show but I’m more than happy to spoil the postscript where Liu describes his early fascination with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dong_Fang_Hong_I">Dong Fang Hong I</a>, China’s first space satellite, and how he saw it trail across the sky as a child:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...I realized that I had a special talent: scales and existences that far exceeded the bounds of human sensory perception—both macro and micro— and that seemed to be only abstract numbers to others, could take on concrete forms in my mind. I could touch them and feel them, much like others could touch and feel trees and rocks. Even today, when references to the 15-billion-light-year radius of the universe and “strings” many orders of magnitude smaller than quarks have numbed most people, the concepts of a light-year or a nanometer can still produce lively, grand pictures in my mind and arouse in me an ineffable, religious feeling of awe and shock.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There’s so many fascinating scenes in the book that detail potential scientific breakthroughs in how we see the world; from computers that can fit into photons called <em>sophons</em>, to bouncing radio waves off the sun in order to make it flash in the night sky like an extrastellar lighthouse.</p>
<p>If sci-fi stuff is of even the slightest interest to you then I would recommend <em>The Three Body Problem</em> in a heartbeat.</p>
Dictionary Stories2018-04-16T02:08:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/dictionary-stories/<p>Earlier today I wrote <a href="https://buttondown.email/robinrendle/archive/2bfbe7ec-f355-4b75-992c-b6891e453b1c">a quick review</a> for <em>Adventures</em> all about Jez Burrows’ new book <a href="http://www.dictionarystories.com/"><em>Dictionary Stories</em></a>. It’s a lovely book and I hope my review cajoles, hood winks and tricks you into picking up a copy.</p>
<p>Here’s a quick snippet from the introduction where Jez writes about his experience writing it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Spend the better part of a year reading and reconfiguring the dictionary to write a book of stories, and you’ll emerge on the other side with more than just paper cuts and a modestly enhanced vocabulary. You’ll remember how inspiration and small pleasures can hide in plain sight, patiently waiting for a keen coconspirator to spring them loose. You’ll find intimate connections between seemingly impossible bedfellows, and the universe will suddenly seem more knowable, if only for a second. You’ll discover the word “famulus,” “flocculent,” and “minibeast,” then sadly realize that, in all likelihood, you’ll never be able to drop them into casual conversation.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Damn I love the way that Jez writes.</p>
The Triumph Street Triple2018-04-14T06:22:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-triumph-street-triple/<p>Of all the things my father tried to introduce me to, only one thing has ever stuck. There was no David Bowie or Lou Reed LP, and there was no Scotland, Spain or trip to northern France that could seduce me. Neither was there a sip of cognac or shooting escapade where I could sit back and enjoy myself. All of those things bored me to tears as a kid. But there was something that loomed in the background I could never really ignore. No matter how hard I fought back I knew it was only a matter of time before I was bitten by “the bug” as he calls it.</p>
<p>By motorcycles, I mean.</p>
<p>So a couple of weeks ago I walked into a showroom and picked up my first brand new bike: a Triumph Street Triple R. It’s actually the second bike I’ve ever owned but yikes is this an improvement over the first. Not only that but it’s one of the most beautiful and elegant machines I’ve ever been in contact with. Actually it reminds me of the time I picked up an iPod Nano and I was just completely swept up by every little detail of it. Everything just <em>works</em>.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/IMG_0008.jpg" alt="IMG_0008.jpg" /></p>
<p>On the day I bought it I drove up and over Twin Peaks, down towards the ocean. And as the sun dipped beyond the horizon the bike changed. All the lights tuned themselves correctly, the dashboard color theme faded away and I felt that this bike wasn’t really even a bike any more. Not like the first clunky, old machine that I had learned to drive on anyway. This thing was like a horse. It had a personality. I figured out that there are things it likes and things it doesn’t. But during that drive the bike had noticed the environment change and it tweaked its behavior in response.</p>
<p>And yes fine, I will admit it, I got the damn thing because of the break-up. There’s no avoiding that. And of course yes this is quite possibly a mid-life crisis and I’m trying my best not to think about the size of the crisis right now. But! Changing the subject and moving on: the thing that I love about motorcyles is that they do provide a confidence boost. And not really in the same way as buying nice clothes or travelling to an exotic locale makes you confident. It’s this feeling that there are a whole bunch of new problems you’ll have to face in the future. Low tire pressure, broken glass on the highway, intense rain and blistering cold, heatwaves in 100 degree traffic jams, pedestrians that walk out into the middle of the road, and steep cambers on winding mountain passes. Death lies at every turn.</p>
<p>Why does this make me confident then? Surely I ought to be a withering bag of nerves and anxiety.</p>
<p>Well, motorcycles are nothing but problems. But they get you to face them. They scare you. You have to meet the outside world in a way that you simply don’t have to with a car. And every tiny thing can kill you, every problem can build up into an even scarier problem.</p>
<p>But I feel like these problems make me a better person somehow.</p>
10 Timeframes2018-04-13T20:19:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/timeframes/<p>I’m reading this post on <a href="http://contentsmagazine.com/articles/10-timeframes/">the value of time</a> by Paul Ford again and dammit it’s the sort of writing that makes me reel with envy:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The only unit of time that matters is heartbeats. Even if the world were totally silent, even in a dark room covered in five layers of foam, you’d be able to count your own heartbeats.</p>
<p>When you get on a plane and travel you go 15 heartbeats per mile. That is, in the time it takes to travel a mile in flight your heart beats 15 times. On a train your heart might beat 250 times per mile.</p>
<p>And we count this up and we make sense of it. We’re constantly switching accelerations; we’re jumping between time frames. That’s what we’re asking people to do every time we make something new, some new tool or product. We’re asking them to reset their understanding of time.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>For the past couple of months I’ve been working on a time tracking app and so I’ve been thinking a lot about how we record and value time. But anyway, I really love the extract that Paul takes from the book <em>The Soul of a New Machine</em> (which I found to be not very sticky and so ditched it like fifty pages in):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As soon as I read that I thought of how my understanding of time is different when I’m on my phone compared to my laptop. On my phone I’m always filtering through mass amounts of noise on Twitter or on Instagram or something. But when I’m sat in front of an honest to goodness keyboard I appreciate that time a great deal more. There’s an earnest attempt to write or read something smart whilst on my phone I’m just trying to scroll through time as quickly as possible.</p>
<p>I don’t know what to call this type of time, this type of surfing the web with a keyboard, but I know that if I don’t do it at least once I week I feel genuinely awful. Traversing my RSS feed and making a few awkward notes about what I’m up to is peculiarly energizing and, oddly enough, inspirational.</p>
<p>I think I’m going to call this feeling Keyboard Time.</p>
Design Systems at Gusto2018-04-12T04:41:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/design-systems-at-gusto/<p>At Gusto we’ve been building our design system for the past two years and thinking about how to scale our product and design process across multiple complex projects and teams. So whether you’re just starting out building a complicated front-end, or if you’re getting ready to build a style guide at a large organization then hopefully you can learn from some of my mistakes that I’ve jotted down below.</p>
<p>Because oh boy I made a lot of them.</p>
<p>Why does Gusto even need a design system though? Well, when I joined the payroll team in June 2016 we identified some issues with the design and development process. There was no pattern library or style guide and the team had nine product designers with a large number of engineers and project managers distributed into missions. The problem with all this is how the communication between those missions had begun to silo into even smaller groups and ultimately this led to a large, confusing front-end codebase.</p>
<p>Your coworkers might not be able to identify a problem and call it an issue with the overall design system, but everyone feels the pain. Product designers will struggle to figure out which components or templates to use, PMs will find that projects take much longer than they first expected and engineers will become frustrated since they spend a lot of time building custom UI. Of course, this is always going to be the case when a company grows to a certain size.</p>
<p>All of these issues stem from a lack of communication though, regardless of how outstanding or smart or brilliant the team might be. If great designers or engineers don’t communicate with one another then these issues are simply inevitable. So it was at this point that I rolled up my sleeves, opened up my code editor, and prepared to fix everyone’s problems by myself.</p>
<p>This is when I learnt the most important systems design lesson.</p>
<h2 id="lesson-1:-you-can't-build-a-design-system-by-yourself" tabindex="-1">Lesson #1: You can’t build a design system by yourself <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/design-systems-at-gusto/#lesson-1:-you-can't-build-a-design-system-by-yourself" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>I genuinely believed that I could hide in the darkest corner of the office, design a great system, build an outstanding front-end, and return to the team a hero. But! There are no heroes in this line of work. In fact there’s a great episode of the podcast Track Changes where Paul Ford and Rich Ziade talk about <a href="https://trackchanges.postlight.com/the-social-dynamics-of-legacy-cf88aa42132a">the social dynamics of legacy code</a>. Paul mentions that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The worst thing you can do for your organization is prove how smart you are.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Oof. When I heard that I realized that I had spent an awful amount of time trying to be the smartest and most brilliant guy in the room and this ultimately led to some friction within the team. No one wants to work with the guy that’s dictatorial and mean. He’s just a jerk.</p>
<p>It wasn’t until much later that I realized that the most successful projects were the ones where I introduced other designers and developers into the process early on. From refactoring our icon system, to a typography refresh, to removing Bootstrap styles from the app, everyone had great feedback beforehand where we could lean on their experience to improve the system.</p>
<p>Also, the important thing to remember about design systems work is that although everyone wants the same outcome, it’s how to go about it that’s the tricky part. And since every org and engineering culture is different I found that the advice from other teams I had read about wasn’t all that helpful to me. But one issue that every development and design team out there has in common is the need for a single source of truth—a home to represent all of their code and design. That way everyone can contribute in a scalable manner without hiding in their own teams and building custom UI all the time.</p>
<p>Anyway, after several days and nights hacking things together, my pal and boss Dora Chan returned with a prototype of what would soon become The Guide.</p>
<p>And it was wondrous.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/guide.png" alt="guide.png" /></p>
<p>As we started to flesh out Dora’s prototype we had three goals that drove all of our decisions:</p>
<ol>
<li>Set high standards for design and front-end development.</li>
<li>Document how components can be used for all teams.</li>
<li>Reign in the code and design inconsistencies we found in the app.</li>
</ol>
<p>This is something that all teams of a certain size need and so it’s unlikely that this news to anyone at this point. However, I think it’s easy for these sorts of rules to become mean and nasty given the right tone. So in the introduction to The Guide I set out to inform the team of our goals in a more collaborative spirit:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This is where all of the documentation for Gusto’s design system is archived for safe keeping; it contains all the assets you need, such as images and illustrations as well as notes on our copywriting style and documentation for our React components. In fact, we like to think of The Guide as a sort of Pokédex.</p>
<p>Ideally this is where we can share information and collaborate in a public space to gain consensus across missions in terms of code, design, accessibility, performance, and branding. If we improve a single component here in The Guide then all of our apps and features will reap the rewards at the same time in a predictable manner.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Building The Guide was tough going though. It required taking all of our code out of our main app, cleaning it up, and placing it into a new repo called the Component Library. This way we would have a common group of components that could be used in any application that Gusto builds for the future. But a great deal of time was spent talking to engineers and designers about this plan and imagining a future where design and development was not only easy but breezy, too.</p>
<h2 id="lesson-2:-a-design-system-doesn't-have-to-be-complete-to-be-useful." tabindex="-1">Lesson #2: A design system doesn’t have to be complete to be useful. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/design-systems-at-gusto/#lesson-2:-a-design-system-doesn't-have-to-be-complete-to-be-useful." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Having all our components in a separate repo ultimately meant that we could use it as the foundation for design at Gusto: every time we wanted to create a new app we could depend upon these settings and styles being consistent and easy-to-use without have to build the whole dang thing from scratch. But we were worried about it being incomplete and unfinished; there wasn’t good documentation for all our styles or even a list of which propTypes were available in our React components, for example.</p>
<p>However as soon as we released The Guide we found that the engineering and design teams at Gusto started using it, even though it was unfinished. This was shocking because The Guide was always our north star for how we wanted to build products and features but it was never as great as we wanted it to be, at least in the beginning. We very slowly pushed improvements to it over time and we were far too hesitant to change anything until it was perfect. Yet after watching the teams at Gusto jump on it so eagerly I now believe that all style guides should aim to be useful but being messy is okay, too.</p>
<p>Great visual design or even the UX of a style guide isn’t anywhere near as important as the documentation being in a single location that everyone can easily find. And if our work saved an engineer or designer five minutes asking someone else on Slack about how to use component X then The Guide is a success, if only a small one.</p>
<h2 id="lesson-3:-design-systems-live-and-die-by-their-documentation." tabindex="-1">Lesson #3: Design systems live and die by their documentation. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/design-systems-at-gusto/#lesson-3:-design-systems-live-and-die-by-their-documentation." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>It was around this time that I learnt my third lesson of systems design work: it’s not just about refactoring older components and coding. Style guides require enormous amounts of careful, deliberate writing and I shortly found that the copywriting is just as important as the code.</p>
<p>And considering we were only two designers doing this work (mostly as a side project) we knew we couldn’t sit down and explain The Guide to everyone that joined the company. So another goal of ours was to ensure that designers and engineers could explore what the system was capable of without having to ask questions all the time. The Guide should ultimately feel like a playground where you can quickly take LEGO blocks and build whatever you want from it. But that took a while to figure out, too. After months of work I found that a style guide is less helpful when it orders people to do something.</p>
<p>Exploration in a design system needed to not only be possible then, but actively encouraged—I imagined that The Guide had to be a warm and welcoming place for any developer or a designer regardless of experience. In short; kindness was the key.</p>
<h2 id="lesson-4:-a-design-system-is-more-than-code-and-design-it's-a-record-of-shared-knowledge." tabindex="-1">Lesson #4: A design system is more than code and design — it’s a record of shared knowledge. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/design-systems-at-gusto/#lesson-4:-a-design-system-is-more-than-code-and-design-it's-a-record-of-shared-knowledge." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>I think most systems designer folks work this out early on in their careers but it took an extraordinarily long time for the shoe to drop for me. And that only started to happen when I read the ever-so-excellent Design Systems by Alla Kholmatova where she writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sometimes we think other teams have got it right and aspire to build a system just like Airbnb. But every approach has its downsides. […] At the heart of every effective design system aren’t the tools, but the shared design knowledge about what makes good design and UX for your particular team and your particular product. If that knowledge is clear, everything else will follow.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>With this little book I learnt that if a design system doesn’t solve the needs of designers and engineers then they’ll feel that the system is getting in the way of their work. My pal Jules Forrest described it <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/inconsistencies-and-productivity/">like this</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Design teams aren’t explicitly rewarded for reusing designs the way engineers know they should write DRY code, so introducing inconsistencies feels like productivity.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So how do we build a design system where the opposite is true? How do we make adding inconsistencies to a design system feel unproductive? Well, I think it’s important to note that designers and engineers introduce inconsistencies to a system not because of the code quality necessarily but due to a flurry of other reasons: poor documentation in a style guide, the naming structure of our components, the inability to quickly scan for what they need.</p>
<p>This means that design systems are more about evangelism than almost anything else. And what I originally assumed was a coding and programming gig turned out to be nothing of the sort — this line of work ended up being about 10% code and 90% collaboration, research, and mentorship.</p>
<p>This is when I realized that style guides aren’t important because they accurately represent the codebase, and they’re certainly not important because they create rules and regulations across a network of teams. Instead, style guides are important because they’re a gathering space. They decrease the social complexity of an organization because all that knowledge can be stored and leveraged.</p>
<h2 id="the-future-of-design-systems" tabindex="-1">The Future of Design Systems <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/design-systems-at-gusto/#the-future-of-design-systems" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>I always find it funny when people talk about the future of X or Y, but if I were to take a wild guess about where all this is leading then I wouldn’t bet on the tools—they’re not really the most important part of design systems work. Style guides are helpful for sure, although it’s a little more complicated than that.</p>
<p>Bear with me for a second, but a short while ago there was <a href="https://austinkleon.com/2018/04/07/increasing-complexity/">a great post</a> by Austin Kleon about how the relationship with his family changed with the birth of his second son. He made a graph that pinpoints the relationships between him, his wife, and his children, representing each of them as nodes in a complex network that gets exponentially more complicated with every addition to the family. Austin doesn’t have to just deal with his relationship with his son, but he now has to be concerned about the relationships between his sons, too.</p>
<p>And the same is true of a design team. With each new addition the relationships between all of the designers increases in complexity, and only gets more complicated when you think about their relationships with product leads, engineers and project managers.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/1_xXesP2yaHyOn15a0QhhjZA.png" alt="1_xXesP2yaHyOn15a0QhhjZA.png" /></p>
<p>Style guides and pattern libraries are important to tackle the inevitable miscommunication errors that pop up in between these complex relationships. However! The real goal of design systems work is to make sure that these relationships are fruitful and in sync with one another from the get go: all of our efforts should be focused on decreasing the social complexity of our teams. That’s the future of design systems.</p>
<p>At least, it’s how I’m thinking about all of this today.</p>
Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future2018-04-11T23:50:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/blockchain-is-not-only-crappy-technology-but-a-bad-vision-for-the-future/<p>This piece by Kai Stinchcombe on <a href="https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec">why blockchain is a terrible idea</a> is pretty dang quotable—he tackles the crazy idea that blockchain is a magical technology wand that you can wave around and solve the “trust problem” between groups of people. My favorite point is this one though:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A lawless and mistrustful world where self-interest is the only principle and paranoia is the only source of safety is a not a paradise but a crypto-medieval hellhole.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’ve sat and talked with blockchain enthusiasts over dinner, I’ve shared their homes for an evening, I’ve looked them in the eye when they start their spiel about why this technology will save the world. And quite frankly I don’t believe a damn word they say. You cannot possibly believe that blockchain, and the currencies that sit on top of it, will solve our problems with financial intermediaries and at the same time invest your life savings in *–coin. It’s insane, desperate, and impossibly naïve. And I believe this is the only article that’s explained why I despise the whole venture from top to bottom.</p>
Advice for a young systems designer2018-04-09T02:05:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/advice-for-a-young-systems-designer/<p>Here’s some advice for designers that are interested in front-end development, product design and systems design work (or in other words, designers that do design for other designers):</p>
<ol>
<li>Don’t get preachy. No-one likes it when you’re giving a sermon.</li>
<li>Team morale can be a huge problem if you keep sounding like a jerk so, you know, you should probably stop doing that.</li>
<li>Patience is the only virtue that counts because making even small adjustments to a large codebase can take weeks or even months.</li>
<li>When you start a new project always start a new spreadsheet.</li>
<li>Don’t be shy: advocate for your design system like there’s no tomorrow.</li>
<li>Run workshops, 1x1s and presentations. Design systems work involves educating, mentoring, collaborating and making a lot of noise about what has already been built. It’s so much more than code: this job is about building a culture of relearning past lessons and long-gone experiments.</li>
<li>Find everyone in the engineering team that’s even remotely interested in working on your styleguide and cling onto them for dear life.</li>
<li>Think about the designer experience from the beginning to the end and build tools for them. Oh, and don’t get in their way; care for them as much as you might a regular ol’ customer or user.</li>
<li>There are no heroes or parades for you in this line of work. Sorry about that.</li>
</ol>
The Internet Got Shrinkwrapped2018-04-03T04:24:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-internet-got-shrinkwrapped/<p>I loved one of the recent episodes of the podcast <em>Track Changes</em> about <a href="https://soundcloud.com/postlighttrackchanges/the-internet-got-shrinkwrapped">how the web has changed</a> and, namely, how the construction of ideas and work has become a commercialized experienced on the web. Okay, that was a very clunky sentence. But what I mean is that not as many folks are building their own websites anymore — who even needs to learn <abbr title="Hypertext markup language">HTML</abbr> if they have a business or, heck, even if they’re a web designer? Most I know despise even the title of “Web Designer” let alone the work itself. We’re all Product Designers now.</p>
<p>If you’re a business: a few clicks here, a few clicks there and boom! You are now the proprietor of a fancy website for a couple of bucks a month. If you’re a product designer: download this framework, click a few buttons, and voilà! You have yourself a portfolio. If you’re a writer: go to this webpage, input your email address and forever be cursed with an inbox of incoherent spam. You now have an audience numbering in the millions!</p>
<p>Rich Ziade, one of the co-hosts of the show, described the current state of the web like this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s over. The notion of having to do the heavy-lifting is gone. Everything is shrinkwrapped.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I think this is both terrible and extraordinary. First, the terrible: the fact that we’re being sucked up into the engines of Instagram, Twitter, Medium and Facebook is an awful thing. The whole reason I fell in love with building websites in the first place is because <em>you can do a better job than them</em>. With a little bit of effort you can write, publish, design and develop a website better than even the New York Times! You can design a new way to communicate if you put enough time into it. You can own your words, you can choose precisely how you want to be remembered.</p>
<p>But, secondly, the extraordinary thing: I don’t think everyone needs to learn how a website works under the hood. Only a small bunch of nerds like me are ever going to go through the hassle of building their own space on the web and that doesn’t mean other folks shouldn’t be able to communicate just because of a technical barrier. But web design doesn’t have to be difficult. We’ve chosen to make the web read-only — in the original spec a webpage was meant to be edited as easily as a Wikipedia document.</p>
<p>We chose to build the web the way we did. But that doesn’t mean we have to live with it. In other words, the Internet might have gotten shrinkwrapped, but we can find ways to unshrink it. On a similar note: this is what a lot of folks don’t really seem to grasp about the government – we <em>are</em> the government. Voting, protesting, volunteering, and donating to causes are the ways in which we can change things. Government is only bad because we made it bad, we let it disintegrate. The government is only as good as we make it.</p>
<p>And the same is true of the web.</p>
Tigerman2018-04-02T18:45:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-success-of-many-days/<p>There’s an unforgettable moment in the novel <em>Tigerman</em> by Nick Harkaway which, even over the course of several years, has been impossible for me to shake. The moment is this one: our protagonist, Sergeant Lester Ferris, is on the brink of finishing a gruelling renovation of his home and at one point in the novel he sits back and takes a moment to think about what success really is:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It looked like a sudden turn for the better because humans saw what was in front of them, didn’t look at the time spent getting to a certain point. This was not a day of success, it was the success of many days, the pay-off of effort.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’ve been obsessed with that phrase, <em>the success of many days</em>, ever since. And I especially love the phrase whenever I think about typography and design. We hear of legendary typefaces that took a decade sitting on someone’s hard drive, stewing through the design process for years, or we hear about the way that type designers go to extraordinary bouts of concentration in order to make things just right.</p>
<p>A beautiful typeface, or a beautiful book, or a beautiful anything, isn’t a lucky accident. It’s the product of many hours, it’s the success of many days, and I like to keep that in mind whenever I find myself losing concentration.</p>
Spineless2018-04-02T02:49:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/spineless/<p>Over the past week or so I’ve been reading <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Spineless-Science-Jellyfish-Growing-Backbone/dp/0735211264">Spineless</a> which is a book by <a href="http://www.juliberwald.com/">Juli Berwald</a> all about jellyfish. I picked it up in the Haight only because of the design of its cover and the random paragraph that I flipped to – but that would be enough. I knew this book was going to be a lovely tale about a topic that I have zero interest or knowledge in.</p>
<p>I think the reason why I would recommend this book, even before I’ve finished reading it, is because jellyfish question everything that we know about life; how they move, how they see, how they eat, how they process information. Everything about them is alien and beyond comprehension and sci-fi as all hell. At least this is how Juli describes them in all their weirdness and splendor. Also, I had never heard of agriculture’s sibling <em>aquaculture</em> before reading this book, neither had I considered how a lot of the machines we build imitate the way that animals move through the world. Juli connects these weird sci-fi threads together and weaves them like gold.</p>
<p>Although after reading a few reviews it appears that some folks dislike the personal and relationship stories that Juli details in the book – about her husband, her kids, and the previous relationships that were knotted together in with her love for jellyfish. But I really liked that stuff, it felt much closer to a blog or a diary and so I would heartily recommend this book if you’re interested in an upbeat collection of stories about how someone fell in love with a topic, how it became an obsession for them, and how they discovered one of the strangest bunch of creatures on the planet.</p>
Isle of Dogs2018-04-01T18:06:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/isle-of-dogs/<p>I’m not a fan of Wes Anderson movies. I mean I love the style and the songs and the acting of course but the plot always falls a little short. At one point or another in the movie everyone will start talking as if they’re reading the first sentence of a paragraph and hopping over the sentences in between to the next. Characters will act irrationally, in favor of the poetry of the scene instead of the story as a whole.</p>
<p>During those moments I’ve always dreamt that someone would jump in and ask Wes to be 10% less Wes because as fantastical and as unrealistic as the worlds can be, the dialogue and plot always need to be realistic and logical. It doesn’t matter if you’re Bill Murray or a very handsome fox.</p>
<p>But watching <a href="https://letterboxd.com/film/isle-of-dogs-2018/">Isle of Dogs</a> last night at the Alamo was the first time where I felt that the whole damn thing worked. All of the parts fit; the graphic design was outstanding, the music was lovely. But most importantly, the characters all had motivations and narrative arcs and jokes and everything I crave from a film.</p>
<p>It was simply wondrous.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/isle-of-dogs.jpg" alt="isle-of-dogs.jpg" /></p>
The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling2018-04-01T00:41:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-zen-diaries-of-garry-shandling/<p>Last night I watched the new documentary about Garry Shandling by Judd Apatow and I hadn’t quite expected to fall in love with it as much as I did. Quite frankly, it swept me off my feet. There’s so much that I adore about the film – the way they show extracts from Garry’s diaries, to the way the film slowly reveals Garry’s eccentricities, his fears, his wild and self-harming ambition, or his kindness. In short: I highly recommend you sit down for a whole evening and watch this thing, even if you don’t care much for Garry’s comedy or his TV shows. It’s delightful regardless.</p>
<p>Here’s the trailer for the documentary:</p>
<div class="preserve-aspect">
<iframe class="preserve-aspect__element" width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/paerP97n4aA?rel=0&showinfo=0" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</div>
The Missing Building Blocks of the Web2018-03-27T05:52:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-missing-building-blocks-of-the-web/<p>Anil Dash on <a href="https://medium.com/@anildash/the-missing-building-blocks-of-the-web-3fa490ae5cbc">the early promise of the web</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For the first few years of the web, the fundamental way that people learned to build web pages was by using the “View Source” feature in their web browser. You would point your mouse at a menu that said something like “View Source” (nobody was browsing the web on a touchscreen back then) and suddenly you’d see the HTML code that made up the page you were looking at. If you squinted, you could see the text you’d been reading, and wrapped around it was a fairly comprehensible set of tags — you know, that paragraph kind of stuff.</p>
<p>It was one of the most effective technology teaching tools ever created. And no surprise, since the web was invented for the purpose of sharing knowledge.</p>
<p>These days, View Source is in bad shape. Most mobile devices don’t support the feature at all. And even on the desktop, the feature gets buried away, or hidden unless you enable special developer settings.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s interesting to note after reading this that it’s clear at one point or another we all agreed that browsers should be “read-by-default.” The first thing you do in a browser is search for something or input a URL at the top. “View source” effectively just flips a browser into edit mode but dang what a half-hearted write mode it is. Anyway, I also really like this point that Anil makes here about taking tiny chunks of one website and placing them into another:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You’re supposed to be able to include other websites (or parts of other websites) in your web pages. Sure, we can do some of that — you’ve seen plenty of YouTube videos embedded inside articles that you’ve read, and as media sites pivot to video, that’s only gotten more commonplace.</p>
<p>But you almost never see a little functional part of one website embedded in another. Old-timers might remember when Flash ruled the web, and people made simple games or interactive art pieces that would then get shared on blogs or other media sites. Except for the occasional SoundCloud song on someone’s Tumblr, it’s a grim landscape for anyone that can imagine a web where bits and pieces of different sites are combined together like Legos.</p>
</blockquote>
Demisemihemidemisemiquaver2018-03-27T04:58:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/demisemihemidemisemiquaver/<p>I think, of all things, I miss her voice the most.</p>
<p>I've been thinking about this a lot over the last week or so but when we were together I would see her not as a person with a beautiful smile or with any other mesmerizing physical quality, but instead as a sound. Her voice had this dependable, reassuring tone and I wish I knew more about musical notation because a photograph could never get the full shape and heft of her personality right. Whenever I saw a picture of her there was always this huge chunk missing, like it was a photograph of someone else.</p>
<p>The only way to see her as I do would be to capture her voice in a lead sheet, I’m sure. All those squiggles and complex tangents! The typographic off-shoots and the indecipherableness of it all!</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/Screenshot%202018-03-26%2021.58.21.png" alt="Screenshot 2018-03-26 21.58.21.png" /></p>
<p>Ultimately words fail to do the sound justice. And I know it might seem completely mad to write this, but it feels like I fell in love with a song.</p>
We Long to Move the Stars to Pity2018-03-25T01:38:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/we-long-to-move-the-stars-to-pity/<p>I first came across this passage in <em>Artful</em> by Ali Smith that I finished just last week and it’s an unforgivably good quote extracted from Flaubert’s <em>Madame Bovary</em>. I haven’t read the book yet, but I believe that in this section the writer is describing a relationship that he finds himself haunted by because words could never quite describe how he felt:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>…one had to discount, he thought, exaggerated speeches that concealed mediocre affections; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since none of us can ever express the exact measure of our needs, or our ideas, or our sorrows, and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when we long to move the stars to pity.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What does that first part mean, “exaggerated speeches that concealed mediocre affections”? Well, I reckon that Flaubert is arguing that we have to forgive bad grammar and misdirected excitement in ourselves and in others. We have to forgive clichés and bad jokes. We have to because sometimes those grammatical errors and half-baked ideas reveal something vulnerable and interesting about us.</p>
<p>“We long to move the stars to pity”, as Flaubert magnificently writes, but we just can’t ever find the right words to do the trick.</p>
<hr />
<p>I was reminded of this extract today as I was walking around Potrero Hill with a friend and whilst she was describing her dissatisfaction with her new job. During our chat there were a few lulls in the conversation where we just couldn’t really describe why we were both so unhappy with everything. And we almost sort of didn’t want to. We couldn’t describe how we felt but I think we also both knew that we were experiencing the same sorts of feelings and there was a measure of comfort in the silence because of that. Trying to describe how we were feeling would somehow cast everything in the wrong light.</p>
<p>Instead of clutching at the easy metaphor or cliché we just sat there in the boba shop, brooding.</p>
Tahoe2018-03-20T06:31:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/tahoe/<p>The night before the breakup, last night actually, I had a dream about our trip to Lake Tahoe. I was stood at the edge of the water, on the pier we had sat on only a few months before, and I was looking over the edge, down into its depths. There was no color in the water, no light at all; inside, the lake was the darkest of greens. It was a color without variation in hue or saturation and the water was silent. All was dead still.</p>
<p>And you were stood there beside me with your long, black hair flapping about even though there wasn’t any wind. It looked like you were underwater but you were stood right there beside me, dry as a bone.</p>
<p>And you wouldn’t say a damn thing.</p>
<p>I gave you a tiny nudge in the side expecting a reply but there was nothing. You didn’t move. And I turned to you, asked how you were doing. Again, nothing. You just stood there, drowning.</p>
<p>A moment later I found myself hovering above the lake in the center and you were far away. I’m not sure how I could hover above the water so effortlessly but for some daft reason, and without question, I began dropping all my things into the lake: my phone, my wallet, my keys. I couldn’t stop. All the photos I had taken of you. Gone.</p>
<p>I woke up in a cold sweat, tearing at the side of my bed as if there was something I could do that would save you from the drowning. But then I found myself alone. And you weren’t there to comfort me. And I wasn’t there to comfort you.</p>
Stars and Gardens2018-03-17T23:40:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/stars-and-gardens/<p>There’s a song by Jonwayne called <em>Green Light</em> where towards the end Anderson Paak takes the reins and sings one of my favorite lines. Well, sort of. In his mild mannered and eloquent style he says that “the stars align and my God...” but whenever I listen to that bit I always hear “the stars align in my garden.”</p>
<p>There’s something about that I completely adore, about the misheard version of Paak’s song I mean. Just imagine it. Celestial bodies on the other side of the universe aligning themselves in such a way, even for the briefest of moments. Grouping themselves together into a private space, your home.</p>
Artful2018-03-17T03:50:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/artful/<p>In Ali Smith’s <em>Artful</em> there’s this lovely description of what literature and form are capable of (as I understand it, <em>form</em> is how a sentence is structured and how it sounds as you say it out loud):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For even if we were to find ourselves homeless, in a strange land, with nothing of ourselves left—say we lost everything—we’d still have another kind of home, in aesthetic form itself, in the familiarity, unchanging assurance that a known rhythm, a recognized line, the familiar shape of a story, a tune, a line or phrase or sentence gives us every time, even long after we’ve forgotten we even know it. I place a jar in Tennessee. Once we know it, we'll never not know it. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May. They always will. Rhythm itself is a kind of form and, regardless of whether it's poetry or prose, it becomes a kind of dwelling place for us.</p>
</blockquote>
What writers really do when they write2018-02-23T23:08:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/what-writers-really-do-when-they-write/<p>George Saunders on <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/04/what-writers-really-do-when-they-write">the art of fiction writing</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A guy (Stan) constructs a model railroad town in his basement. Stan acquires a small hobo, places him under a plastic railroad bridge, near that fake campfire, then notices he’s arranged his hobo into a certain posture – the hobo seems to be gazing back at the town. Why is he looking over there? At that little blue Victorian house? Stan notes a plastic woman in the window, then turns her a little, so she’s gazing out. Over at the railroad bridge, actually. Huh. Suddenly, Stan has made a love story. Oh, why can’t they be together? If only “Little Jack” would just go home. To his wife. To Linda.</p>
<p>What did Stan (the artist) just do? Well, first, surveying his little domain, he noticed which way his hobo was looking. Then he chose to change that little universe, by turning the plastic woman. Now, Stan didn’t exactly decide to turn her. It might be more accurate to say that it occurred to him to do so; in a split-second, with no accompanying language, except maybe a very quiet internal “Yes.”</p>
</blockquote>
We can only chart what we can see2018-02-23T06:51:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/we-can-only-chart-what-we-can-see/<p>Kory Stamper on the use of <a href="https://korystamper.wordpress.com/2018/01/11/down-the-shithole-why-lexicographers-need-your-profanity/">the word “shithole”</a> by #45 and what it means for lexicographers:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...the American press has traditionally been loath to print unseemly language like cusswords in full, and this has been a problem for lexicographers on a number of levels. As we all know, dictionary entries need to be based on a word’s accumulated and sustained use in print. We don’t just use that body of accumulated use to come up with a word’s definition, which tends to be one of the easier things to describe, but also its status and its register. Status and register are fancy word-nerd ways of describing where exactly in the language a word sits, and how a word is deployed. Is a word academic jargon? Is it the sort of thing you only see in a Pope or Blake poem? What about Doctor Who fanfic? Is this word a slur? Or is this word boring and everywhere, the Wonder Bread of words, remarkable only because it is wholly unremarkable? If a word is used in a particular context, or with a particular sort of connotation, a lexicographer should tell you that by using those italicized labels that come before the entry: informal, formal, technical, academic, literary, vulgar, disparaging, obscene.</p>
</blockquote>
Tools for Thinking and Tools for Systems2018-01-28T22:35:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/tools-for-thinking-and-tools-for-systems/<p>We published <a href="https://css-tricks.com/tools-thinking-tools-systems/">Tools for Thinking and Tools for Systems</a> the other day and I reckon it’s the beginning of a much larger rant that’ll get round to writing one day. The gist of my argument is this: I think we’ve spent an awful amount of time building systems-based design tools (such as styleguides and pattern libraries) but we haven’t spent anywhere near enough time considering how to design tools that help designers think:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...our current tools encourage me to design the finished product first. They beg me to mess with rounded corners, colors, typefaces and stroke styles.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Tools such as Figma and Sketch are great for those sorts of hi-fidelity mocks but they’re not as good keeping designers focused on UX. And I worry that this distinction between these two separate tools hasn’t been made particularly clear in the past.</p>
Reading Design2018-01-23T08:08:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/reading-design/<p>I’ve read this piece <a href="http://alistapart.com/article/readingdesign">about design</a> by Dean Allen multiple times and yet I can’t appear to shake it. Every time I read it I find something new that perfectly summarizes that moment in my career. Here’s a list of design rules from the piece that is, right now, effectively my life:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>An Entirely Incomplete List of Things a Non–Illiterate Designer Should Know Before Being a Designer:</p>
<ul>
<li>That text will inevitably be read before it is looked at</li>
<li>That words themselves make remarkably effective clip art</li>
<li>That the self-conscious layering of messages usually subtracts more value than it adds</li>
<li>That the practical value of white space towers over its value as a design element</li>
<li>That the physiobiology of reading is one that demands easy points of exit and entry</li>
<li>That simply paying attention to the design of type, or distinguishing it as “fine” or “invisible” or “classical” is like making a big deal about putting salt on a boiled egg</li>
<li>That letters are not pictures of things, but things</li>
<li>That words are not things, but pictures of things</li>
<li>That arbitrarily altering (or allowing software to alter) the shapes of letters, and the spacing between letters and words, is done at one’s own risk</li>
<li>That emphasis comes at a cost</li>
<li>That overstating the obvious can be effective, but not all the time</li>
<li>The knowledge to back up design decisions clearly without falling into a fog of hidden meaning, or so–called “creativity”</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
How to Read the Internet2018-01-20T07:14:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/how-to-read-the-internet/<p>Before newsletters and social networks there was RSS, a tool that helped us keep up to date with our favorite websites. And it was relatively simple, too: through a web app such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Reader/">Google Reader</a>, you could effectively subscribe to another website’s content feed and get an alert whenever something new had been posted. On the developer side, a web designer would write a little bit of code to post all of their website’s content in a format that Google Reader could then scrape and serve to you.</p>
<p>Why did RSS (or Really Simple Syndication) exist in the first place though? Well, strangely enough, way back in 1999 you’d have to visit a website multiple times a day just to see if anything new had been posted. There was no Twitter or Facebook Feed, and so thankfully RSS solved that problem; whenever a website updated their feed we’d be notified immediately.</p>
<p>But it was through this data format and feed reader web app that something magical began to take place over time, on a much smaller scale, for me: in the mid-naughts I started following people on the other side of the world through the ups and downs of their careers, through to the final days of their lives even. Some people wrote about the painful moments of their relationships and recorded their day-to-day struggles, treating their websites like an open diary. Others honed in on a specific topic such as programming or poetry and were clearly brilliant but mysterious in ways I found alluring.</p>
<p>Scanning these feeds over breakfast or lunch and on the train
to work, I would likely stumble on <a href="http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/169873399/clackity-noise">a fantastic blog post</a> or a long and <a href="https://ilovetypography.com/2007/10/22/so-you-want-to-create-a-font-part-1/">rambling thing about fonts</a>. I would subscribe to tumblr feeds, or the work of professional journalists, or the work of <a href="http://www.zeldman.com/">fellow</a> <a href="http://aworkinglibrary.com/">web</a> <a href="https://adactio.com/">designers</a> and <a href="http://www.hughhowey.com/blog/">indie novelists</a>. At the time it seemed like all of this was a critical part of the web.</p>
<p>RSS was the feed before the Feed™️. You could see all of your subscriptions of every website at a quick glance — and yet we have Twitter and Facebook and newsletters today, so who cares? We don’t need RSS any more, right?</p>
<p>Well, I believe that RSS was much more than just a fad. It made blogging possible for the first time because you could follow dozens of writers at the same time and attract a considerably large audience if you were the writer. There were no ads (except for the high-quality <a href="https://daringfireball.net/">Daring Fireball</a> kind), no one could slow down your feed with third party scripts, it had a good baseline of typographic standards and, most of all, it was <em>quiet</em>. There were no comments, no likes or retweets. Just the writer’s thoughts and you.</p>
<p>So instead of being just another way to get posts from blogs that you were interested in, RSS fostered countless communities and friendships <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/chloe/">across oceans, across networks</a>. And because of that I now think of RSS as a window into a room with the smartest, kindest people — and sometimes, on the rarest of occasions, they would open up the window and wave back.</p>
<p>But then, rather suddenly, Google decided to kill Reader and it looked like RSS had been caught in the crossfire, too. In hindsight it’s clear that this was the greatest weakness and flaw of RSS: because Google Reader was a free service (and a decent one, too) developers wouldn’t build tools that would compete with it. Google had effectively hijacked the open technology, destroying the competition by making a free service, and then killed the tool that was so associated with it that RSS and Google Reader appeared to be the same thing. (Insert rant about the relationship between google dot com and the rest of the web today here).</p>
<p>The unhealthy bond between RSS and Google Reader is proof of how fragile the web truly is, and it reveals that those communities can disappear just as quickly as they bloom. However, with that being said, today RSS is alive and well. A vast number of websites still support the syndication formats that fall under the umbrella of what I consider RSS to be. And over the years since Google Reader disappeared there’s been a resurgence of competitive apps and services — some of these do the RSS feed scraping, others simply display the data, and some do both.</p>
<p>But if you’ve never heard of RSS before, or if you fancy getting back into RSS because the Feeds of other social networks have been stressing you out, then here’s a rough guide of how to do that today. This is how I read the web in 2018.</p>
<h2 id="the-setup">The Setup</h2>
<p>There are two services that I’ve fallen in love with over the years: <a href="https://feedbin.com/">Feedbin</a> (a service that saves all my subscriptions and keeps everything in sync) and Reeder (<a href="http://reederapp.com/mac/">a macOS</a> and <a href="http://reederapp.com/ios/">iOS app</a> that lets me read those subscriptions). These two are a match made in heaven and I haven’t changed anything about my setup in <em>years</em> because it’s precisely what I want, although I reckon it’s important to note that there are a number of alternatives out there and so this setup might not be precisely what you want and/or need.</p>
<p>Also I guess it’s quickly worth mentioning that a feed is typically in a format such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(Web_standard)">Atom</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS">RSS</a>, <a href="https://jsonfeed.org/">json</a> or XML — but you don’t really need to care which format a website supports because most of these feed-reading services will accept them all. We just need to care about the URL of the website we want to subscribe to, such as robinrendle.com, which we would just copy and paste to the RSS feed reader of our choice. What the app will then do is search for a link in the <code class="highlighter-rouge">head</code> of the website that <a href="https://robinrendle.com/feed.xml">looks like this</a>:</p>
<pre><code><html lang="en">
<! -- other stuff -->
<link href="https://robinrendle.com/feed.xml" rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml">
</code></pre>
<p>But do you need to know that to use RSS? Absolutely not.</p>
<p>Anyway, Feedbin is one of those services that’ll take a format like that, check to see if the feed has been updated, and then return the results. Effectively it’s the service that stores all of my RSS subscriptions and makes sure that they’re synced across devices.</p>
<p>I pay $5 a month for Feedbin but I feel like I get way more than my money’s worth. In fact, Feedbin is sort of like the plumbing of RSS for me — I don’t interact with the site at all and I think perhaps I’ve logged in only a couple of times over the years but I’m still a huge fan. And knowing that I’m a paying customer makes me hopeful that a sustainable business can be built out of it.</p>
<p>But if you just want to give RSS a try then Feedbin has a reader built into the web app itself. You can login, add some subscriptions (by copying and pasting the URLs) and there you have it! You can read anything you’d like. Here’s what that UI looks like:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/Screenshot%202018-01-19%2023.01.png" alt="Screenshot 2018-01-19 23.01.png" /></p>
<p>However, as I mentioned earlier I happen to use the Reeder apps for their customization options and offline-storage features for actually reading the feeds that Feedbin manages. So what I did for my setup was snag the login details from my account and added them to the Reeder apps.</p>
<p>So, on to Reeder: it’s a suite of apps that will take login details from a feed reading service (like Feedbin) and then display that information. The Reeder apps (not to be confused with Google <em>Reader</em>) are where I spend most of my time instead of hitting up a website to see if it’s been updated — I adore this suite of apps more than words can say and if I had to choose my Twitter account over my RSS setup I wouldn’t hesitate for a second — I’d throw Twitter right into the ocean.</p>
<p>In order to read anything from a website with RSS though you’ll need to add a feed. Once you’ve bought and installed the Reeder app, and then synced it with your Feedbin account (or with something similar), you can head over to a website and copy its URL. In this instance let’s say we want to subscribe to all stories from <a href="http://nyt.com/">nyt.com</a>:</p>
<video autoplay="autoplay" loop="loop" class="cell-b20">
<source src="https://robinrendle.com/images/1.mp4" type="video/mp4" /></video>
<p>And once you’ve added it there it’ll appear with a collection of the most recent posts in the sidebar. In the NYT’s case they only give you little snippets of the articles but in many cases a website will make the entire contents of an article available:</p>
<video autoplay="autoplay" loop="loop" class="cell-b20">
<source src="https://robinrendle.com/images/2.mp4" type="video/mp4" /></video>
<p>Of course, over the years I’ve customized Reeder (because I’m a picky type nerd) and so I‘ve set wider text columns and used <a href="https://djr.com/output/">Output</a> by David Jonathan Ross, for legibility’s sake. I reckon this really is the perfect way for me to read the web and I can only imagine the number of hours I’ve spent staring at this app.</p>
<h2 id="2018-the-blogs-are-back">2018: the blogs are back</h2>
<p>A friend of mine the other day said that “maybe <a href="https://medium.com/">Medium</a> only exists because Google Reader died — Reader left a vacuum, and the social network filled it.” I’m not entirely sure I agree with that, but it sure seems likely. And if that’s the case then the death of Google Reader probably led to the emergence of email newsletters, too. And yet, however great those little email updates are, they’re mostly unarchived and floating around in people’s inboxes. A lot of them aren’t accessible via a URL and so in time they’ll be forgotten and washed away — some of them might be accessible via the <a href="https://archive.org/">Internet Archive</a> at one point or another, but most of them won’t be.</p>
<p>On a similar note, many believe that <a href="https://ia.net/topics/web-trend-map-2018/">blogging is making a return</a>. Folks now seem to recognize the value of having your own little plot of land on the web and, although it’s still pretty complex to make your own website and control all that content, it’s worth it in the long run. No one can run ads against your thing. No one can mess with the styles. No one can censor or sunset your writing.</p>
<p>Not only that but when you finish making your website you will have gained superpowers: you now have an independent voice, a URL, and a home on the open web.</p>
<p>I think that’s why my feelings about RSS are so strong. And I know this might sound peculiar and perhaps even silly, but I have an emotional attachment to RSS the technology and RSS the community that sort of defies explanation. I suppose it’s the same way I feel about my library: I’ve collected a little treasure trove of other people’s ideas, and I’m not entirely sure what my life would look like without them.</p>
Making the Music of the Mazg2018-01-15T18:25:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/making-the-music-of-the-mazg/<p>In a lovely post about <a href="https://www.mcdbooks.com/features/sourdough">the relationship between fiction writing and machine learning</a>, Robin Sloan discusses how he wrote songs for his novel Sourdough with the help of artificial intelligence. However, Robin has some issues with that phrase in this context:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’ve taken pains to call this “machine learning,” not “artificial intelligence,” because, in this case, there’s really nothing intelligent about it. These systems — whether they’re working on text, images, or audio — learn statistical models that allow them to mimic the structure of the material they’re trained on. For example, the system I trained on old science fiction stories knows that if it has generated the character T, followed by the character H, it ought next to generate E, or maybe A, or O — but almost certainly not F, or J, or Q. If you can imagine many, many of these probabilities linked in a sprawling mesh: you have a rough model of the English language.</p>
</blockquote>
Bond2018-01-13T06:47:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/bond/<p><a href="http://bond.backerkit.com/">Bond</a> is a new conference set in San Francisco this March 9-10 that “examines how creators make a living through the internet.” I just picked up my tickets and yet I have no idea what to expect, besides the fact that this is a project by <a href="http://goodonpaper.com/">Andy McMillan</a> and so there is only one thing to expect really; an event that happens to be completely outstanding.</p>
<p>I’m looking forward to the conference itself but I wanted to make a quick note about the website, designed by <a href="http://paulo.is/">Paulo</a>. In fact, Bond is the sort of website that reminds me why I wanted to become a web designer in the first place; beautiful typography, short and to the point writing, luscious illustrations that ooze across the whole page. It’s a visual delight that’s much more than surface-level loveliness.</p>
<p>To be honest, whenever Paulo shows me what he’s working on there’s always this intense pang of jealousy I feel in the pit of my stomach. It’s the good sort of jealousy though. It’s the type of feeling that makes me want to stand up and try that extra bit harder to impress my friends, all of whom happen to be much smarter and kinder than I am.</p>
<p>Anyway, I hope you’re all coming along because I’ll certainly be there, ready-as-ever to learn about how to live and work on the internet.</p>
The Ledger2018-01-09T06:25:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-ledger/<p>Waiting for the moment when it all goes to hell is exhausting. In a relationship, I mean. Each bad joke and every forgetful act, it all has to add up, right?</p>
<p>I imagine it’s all counted in a ledger; every single one of their friends that you don’t get on with, each turn of phrase that failed. Every time you looked at your phone. Every poorly timed compliment. And one day the tally adds up in the wrong column. The charm and jokes and smiles no longer outweigh the forgetfulness, or the sex. And then suddenly it swings around again; there are smiles and hugs and everything. Without warning, out of nowhere, everything is fine. The ledger be damned.</p>
<p><em>Are you okay</em> I want to ask when she’s happy or when she’s sad – <em>are you okay</em> – or even when we’re arguing – <em>but are you okay</em> – I want to ask when something mean is said (a comment with a little bite, a flash of teeth and a drunken glare).</p>
<p>Later, when I’m alone I wonder if that giggle in the car was too quiet. Or the silence too long. Was the wrong question asked at the wrong time? Did I misunderstand a comment and, in doing so, did something important glide right passed me? Every time I’m with her I worry, and it’s probably a mixture of low self esteem and self respect and a mix of other things that I don’t quite understand.</p>
<p>Where is the end, I wonder. And will I ever see it coming?</p>
Inconsistencies and productivity2018-01-09T05:26:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/inconsistencies-and-productivity/<p>I was chatting with my pal <a href="https://julesforrest.com/">Jules Forrest</a> earlier today—she happens to be one of the best designers and developers that I know—and she mentioned something really interesting that I’ve been rolling around in my head all day. We were talking about design systems and how to incentivize good systems work across an organization when Jules argued that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Design teams aren’t explicitly rewarded for reusing designs the way engineers know they should write DRY code, so introducing inconsistencies feels like productivity.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’ve found this to be the case in almost every team I’ve worked on. In fact, it takes a lot of time to design robust systems that can scale across every part of a UI/product and doing all that work weirdly enough doesn’t <em>feel</em> like work, instead it’s more akin to unnecessary hassle and stress. But I can’t help think that this is what should differentiate the work of product designers from the work of graphic or print designers—and orgs should really incentivize simple and perhaps even boring additions to a system or a product.</p>
<p>I replied to Jules that <em>yes yes yes</em> that’s perfect and in a rare moment of clarity I riffed on what she said, arguing that <em>“the hard work [of product design and building websites] is doing something almost unseen, unnoticed.”</em></p>
<p>Anyways, you should follow <a href="https://twitter.com/julesforrest">Jules on Twitter</a> immediately because yikes she’s a constant fount of knowledge and smarts in this department.</p>
Buttondown2018-01-06T22:56:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/buttondown/<p>Supposedly TinyLetter <a href="http://mailchi.mp/6b0e9256cfd5/a-note-about-tinyletter">won’t be shutting down in 2018</a> but it seems like it’s being sunsetted and/or merged into the larger MailChimp suite of products. Although that’s probably okay for most TinyLetter fans I’ve always wanted to experiment with a new setup that’s optimized specifically for writing Markdown and that’s only since <a href="https://robinrendle.com/adventures/">Adventures</a> doesn’t need an elaborate layout or anything, in fact I don’t even want those emails to be pretty. Thankfully however it looks like such a tool exists already: <a href="https://buttondown.email/">Buttondown</a> by <a href="https://twitter.com/justinmduke">Justin Duke</a>.</p>
<p>There’s so many cool things about this project, not only the features and copywriting which all appear to be outstanding, but also the fact that Buttondown’s <a href="https://buttondown.email/running-costs">running costs are public</a>, too.</p>
CSS is Awesome2018-01-05T01:48:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/css-is-awesome/<p>Ever since Brandon Smith’s post about how <a href="https://css-tricks.com/css-is-awesome/">CSS is Awesome</a> was published in mid-2017 I’ve been entirely obsessed with it. I think it puts into words something significant that hasn’t really been said before about the language:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>CSS is hard because its properties interact, often in unexpected ways. Because when you set one of them, you're never just setting that one thing. That one thing combines and bounces off of and contradicts with a dozen other things, including default things that you never actually set yourself.</p>
<p>One rule of thumb for mitigating this is, <em>never be more explicit than you need to be</em>. Web pages are responsive by default. Writing good CSS means leveraging that fact instead of overriding it. Use percentages or viewport units instead of a media query if possible. Use <code>min-width</code> instead of <code>width</code> where you can. Think in terms of rules, in terms of what you really mean to say, instead of just adding properties until things look right. Try to get a feel for how the browser resolves layout and sizing, and make your changes and additions on top of that judiciously. Work with CSS, instead of against it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Over the course of 2017 this post changed how I write CSS, especially that bit about <code>min-width</code> and <code>width</code>. That’s because what Brandon is really trying to do is get us to think in a very abstract way when it comes to designing things for the web. Whenever we’re building a feature for a project we really need to consider how to make that extra leap, that little intellectual abstraction, which ought to help us write better CSS; designing interfaces that are less error prone and more responsive (not just to screen or viewport size, but also other elements that might appear).</p>
<p>I think it also helps us understand the concept of what designing for the web really means. For example, as pixel-perfect designs bled in from the print world (where being precise is vital to printing a good book), we suddenly found ourselves in a world that begs for imprecision. To design things flexibly. To say “this isn’t perfect, but it works best under all circumstances, rather than optimized for one.”</p>
<p>This is why CSS is a useful toolbox for designers who work on the web to learn more about – because it encourages us to think in that abstract way, to consider all the variables regardless of how messy they might be. And I think that despite how much you might want to control it, or bury the language in a mountainous rubble of JavaScript, the weirdness of the web will still be there, baked into the language itself. You can’t escape it.</p>
<p>The peculiarity and straight-up weirdness of the CSS language reminds us all that the web is not a platform owned by a single corporate entity, but rather a weird (despite <a href="https://robinrendle.comnotes/an-incomplete-list-of-mistakes/">a little broken</a>) and lively (despite <a href="https://robinrendle.comnotes/in-defense-of-webfonts/">a little difficult</a>) network that we’re free to experiment with as we see fit. And that’s why CSS is awesome for me.</p>
Art at Scale2018-01-02T00:15:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/art-at-scale/<p>The other day the programmer Bret Victor released <a href="http://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/">a series of private emails with Alan Kay</a> (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay">the famous</a> computer scientist) where Alan discusses how we require public, unfettered research to truly innovate because businesses are trying to solve pre-existing and visible problems, and aren’t looking for them. But I really like <a href="https://ia.net/topics/innovation-as-art-at-scale/">Oliver Reichenstein’s take</a> on the matter here:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One cannot innovate under business objectives. Businesses are trying to solve problems—fundamental research, first of all, finds problems.</p>
<p>Businesses approach innovation like that guy who is looking for his keys under the bright lantern—and not in the dark alley where he lost them. Fundamental innovation cannot be done under the bright lantern of ROI and shareholder value. It needs the freedom to search in the darkness where the problems lie.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I particularly enjoyed the link that Oliver added at the end to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXQPL9GooyI&feature=youtu.be">a talk by Kenneth Stanley</a> all about the same stuff, namely that sometimes objectives are dumb and we need to experiment wildly in all directions to learn new things.</p>
On Track2017-12-26T21:49:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/on-track/<p>I can’t remember the last time I felt quite like this. There’s a sense that everything’s on track and progress is being made; my day to day work isn’t quite as scary as it was a year ago (in fact now I’m beginning to feel like this whole career of mine might’ve been a good idea after all) also I’m feeling like my home is no longer a temporary resting ground or campsite. I have a rug and a candle and a small batch of close friends in San Francisco.</p>
<p>Beyond any work or any technical skills that I’d like to improve this coming year though, I’d like to focus on activism. Political and civil activism to be more exact. So learning the name and politics of the mayor, Senator, and Congresswoman of my state is a small start but it’s not enough.</p>
<p>2018 is the year I learn how my new home works.</p>
Ubiquity and consistency2017-12-23T18:49:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/ubiquity-and-consistency/<p>I really like this post by Jeremy Keith on <a href="https://adactio.com/journal/13229">the difference between under and over-engineering</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Ubiquity; universality; accessibility—however you want to label it, it’s what lies at the heart of the World Wide Web. It’s the idea that anyone should be able to access a resource, regardless of technical or personal constraints. It’s an admirable goal, and what’s even more admirable is that the web succeeds in this goal! But sometimes something’s gotta give, and that something is control.</p>
<p>[...] Take page navigations. That’s literally what browsers do. Click on a link, and the browser fetches that URL, displaying progress at it goes. The alternative, as exemplified by single page apps, is to do all of that for yourself using JavaScript: figure out the routing, show some kind of progress, load some JSON, parse it, convert it into HTML, and update the DOM.</p>
<p>Personally, I tend to go for the first option. Partly that’s because I like to apply the rule of least power, but mostly it’s because I’m very lazy (I also have qualms about sending a whole lotta JavaScript down the wire just so the end user gets to do something that their browser would do for them anyway). But I get it. I understand why others might wish for greater control, even if it comes with a price tag of fragility.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’ve been thinking along similar lines when someone suggests using a third party tool or framework at work (for example <a href="https://github.com/felixrieseberg/React-Spreadsheet-Component">a spreadsheet component</a>); if we want complete control then we should make our own, but if we want the ubiquity of that design and subsequently we’re okay with limiting ourselves by the original codebase then that’s fine.</p>
Who Goes Nazi?2017-12-21T15:51:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/who-goes-nazi/<p>Dorothy Thompson, writing in 1941 about a particularly terrifying game called <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/">Who Goes Nazi</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.</p>
<p>It is preposterous to think that they are divided by any racial characteristics. Germans may be more susceptible to Nazism than most people, but I doubt it. Jews are barred out, but it is an arbitrary ruling. I know lots of Jews who are born Nazis and many others who would heil Hitler tomorrow morning if given a chance. There are Jews who have repudiated their own ancestors in order to become “Honorary Aryans and Nazis”; there are full-blooded Jews who have enthusiastically entered Hitler’s secret service. Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind.</p>
</blockquote>
Now I Am Going to Write a Book2017-12-21T13:03:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/now-i-am-going-to-write-a-book/<p>Robin Sloan on his novel Sourdough and the author M.F.K Fischer <a href="https://fsgworkinprogress.com/2017/12/now-i-am-going-to-write-a-book/">for FSG</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>And for me, voice is the thing. In a novel, I will forgive any flaw, overlook any omission, if the voice on the page has that sizzling Tesla-coil energy. A book in which nothing happens is fine—it’s great!—if the voice is magnetic. M. F. K. Fisher transformed food writing and she influences it to this day: there’s a mix of high and low that you’ll find in the best food writers, fluency with the farthest reaches of sophistication balanced by a healthy sense of irony. It’s pure Fisher. For me, though, the appeal goes beyond food writing; her style on the page could propel a novel about nearly anything. So, to aim for anything even remotely Fisher-like was . . . deeply aspirational.</p>
</blockquote>
Net Promoter Score Considered Harmful (and What UX Professionals Can Do About It)2017-12-21T11:10:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/net-promoter-score-considered-harmful-and-what-ux-professionals-can-do-about-it/<p>Jared Spool <a href="https://blog.usejournal.com/net-promoter-score-considered-harmful-and-what-ux-professionals-can-do-about-it-fe7a132f4430">on the harmful measurement of NPS</a>, the metric that many businesses use, especially in the Bay Area, to define customer satisfaction:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We can’t reduce user experience to a single number<br />
this is the biggest flaw of NPS. It tries to achieve an outcome that can’t be achieved. It’s appealing to our management because it promises to solve a problem that can’t be solved so simply.</p>
<p>Customer experience is the sum total of all the interactions our customers have with our products, sites, employees, and the brand. Every sequence of interactions will differ for every customer.</p>
<p>People who believe in NPS believe in something that doesn’t actually do what they want. NPS scores are the equivalent of a daily horoscope. There’s no science here, just faith.</p>
</blockquote>
China’s Selfie Obsession2017-12-21T09:52:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/chinas-selfie-obsession/<p>I can’t stop thinking about this piece by <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/18/chinas-selfie-obsession">Jiayang Fan for the New Yorker</a> all about obsession and celebrity worship and Chinese social networks:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In China, he felt, it is still possible for celebrity worship to capture the entire culture. “Some of my students regard it as the defining feature of their existence, the thing that gives their life meaning when everything else seems out of their control,” he said. “To participate in this culture is to verify your existence.” He recalled a student who spent vast amounts of time pining for a particular celebrity. One day, in a lottery, she won a ticket to see him in person. After agonizing for some time, she decided not to go. “I knew she wouldn’t go,” Wu said. “For her, this celebrity might as well have been a deity. You don’t want to come face-to-face with your god, because it’s frightening to think that you might see a pimple on his chin.</p>
</blockquote>
Why Write Fiction in 2017?2017-12-19T16:38:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/why-write-fiction-in-2017/<p>Joe Fassler <a href="https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/12/12/write-fiction-2017/">on writing, focus and disconnecting from the web</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As twenty-first-century first-world humans, our first act in the morning is to check our phones—the nineteenth-century word we use to familiarize the glowing portals we carry with us, windowpanes we caress until they show us what we want. But writing, by necessity, means saying no to all of that. It’s an activity that must be monotasked—there is no other way to do it. And so it reminds us how it felt to do only one thing.</p>
<p>I think of the angels of the Paradiso, who when asked by Dante for the secret of their happiness, say: “We long for what we have.” Writing is a commitment to longing for what you have—an hour to kill, the pen, the paper, the mind’s low whirr—and no more.</p>
</blockquote>
Dora2017-12-18T08:25:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/dora/<p>This is just the sort of thing she would hate.</p>
<p>Sentimentality, high fives, and any sort of public boasting is not her style and after finding out that I wrote something as nostalgic and emotional like this about her then she’s very likely to send me a blunt reply along the lines of ಠ_ಠ. But looking back over my career I can’t think of many people besides <a href="https://twitter.com/doralchan?lang=en">Dora Chan</a> who have had such an impact on how I think, how I work and ultimately how I tend to my life.</p>
<p>Over the past year at Gusto, Dora has been my reluctant mentor on the payroll team, teaching me about product design, web development, and the tax system here. But for just a moment, if you’d let me, I’d like to describe why Dora has been such a great influence on my work.</p>
<p>First: she’s the best designer I’ve ever met. Careful, deliberate and brutally honest to such an extent that you quickly realize that there’s this powerful mind at work, always moving, always crunching and grinding on a problem, with every focused second deconstructing, challenging, synthesizing what you’re both talking about; every conversation with Dora leaves you with the feeling that you’ve become a fraction of a percent smarter just by being in her presence.</p>
<p>Second: she’s taught me patience and how to investigate a problem before jumping to conclusions. I’ve watched that process as I’ve sat next to her and like a small child watching an adult they admire I’ve tried to mimic the way that she can context-switch so effortlessly between programming, visual and UX design. I’ve watched her ask questions during the design process and work like a detective trying to solve a crime. I’ve watched her take great care over the smallest of details, the sorts of things that don’t make much of a difference at the time, but over the course of a year, over the course of a life, they all add up.</p>
<p>This is most likely the hardest lesson for a designer to learn and, although I’m not quite there yet, I feel like I’ve made significant improvements thanks to her patience and her many, many ಠ_ಠs; Dora has taught me how to critique a design and how to shelve my ego whilst deconstructing something that I’ve worked on.</p>
<p>Most important of all though I’ve noticed the way that Dora talks to people. She tends to ask them a torrent of questions before getting started on the work and I soon discovered that’s because the first step of any project is finding all the ways that we miscommunicate with one another by accident. It could be the scope of the project. It could be the approach itself. Or it could be whether there’s a larger and more complex problem at work.</p>
<p>As she moves on from Gusto I’ll be sure to miss Dora dearly but if she has a motto that I can take to heart and apply to my work without her then it ought to be this: <em>Care for, and question, everything.</em></p>
Where the GOP’s Tax Extremism Comes From2017-12-07T04:19:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/where-the-gops-tax-extremism-comes-from/<p>Andrew Winston writing <a href="https://medium.com/@AndrewWinston/where-the-gops-tax-extremism-comes-from-90eb10e38b1c">for Ev’s blog</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...consider the way so many Americans talk about government, like it’s some external group. It’s bizarre. We are government — it’s our shared responsibility. Our neighbors, friends, family, and ourselves work in the government keeping our complicated society going. Dismissing them all as “bureaucrats” is insulting and wildly inaccurate. Exact numbers for government employment are not easy to assemble. But, we know there are 3.2 million elementary and secondary school teachers, well over a million people in law enforcement and fire departments, 2 million citizens in the active and reserve military, and on and on. In short, tens of millions of people work in government in some way. Those think tanks that hate all government express shock at these numbers.</p>
<p>But why are they shocked? Take a good look around at how much of our society is shared — our physical infrastructure, our modern communications infrastructure, our public safety and health services, our protection of clean air and water and a stable climate, our system to ensure safe food and drugs, our educational system for pre-K through college, and so much more. It takes a lot of people and investment to look this good (or even not so good at times).</p>
<p>Then consider that we also provide shared resources for the entire country, no matter how remote. For example, the stimulus package of 2009, which fiscal conservatives hated, allocated billions to bring broadband to rural areas (those places that generally dislike big government). Investments like these build a fair, thriving society…and I think it’s worth it.</p>
</blockquote>
The Elements of Eloquence2017-11-30T05:51:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-elements-of-eloquence/<blockquote>
<p>Shakespeare was not a genius. He was, without the distant shadow of a doubt, the most wonderful writer who ever breathed. But not a genius. No angels handed him his lines, no fairies proofread for him. Instead, he learnt techniques, he learnt tricks, and he learnt them well.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is how Mark Forsyth’s <em>The Elements of Eloquence</em> begins and yet it doesn’t stop; every moment of this book about rhetoric and the English language is packed to the rafters with smarts. Mark gives us a whirlwind tour of the so-called “flowers of rherotic”—devices such as alliteration, metonymy, prolepsis and merism—that have been used by poets, writers and bards to make their writing both hypnotic and beautiful.</p>
<p>Here’s another section from the opening chapter:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>English teaching at school is unfortunately, obsessed with what a poet thought, as though that were of any interest to anyone. Rather than being taught about how a poem is phrased, schoolchildren are asked to write essays on what William Blake thought about the Tiger; despite the fact that William Blake was a nutjob whose opinions, in a civilised society, would be of no interest to anybody apart from his parole officer. A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else.</p>
</blockquote>
A Responsive Spreadsheet2017-11-30T04:02:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/a-responsive-spreadsheet/<p>At Gusto I’ve been working on a spreadsheet interface that’s a little complicated and elaborate but it got me to wondering how we might build <a href="https://css-tricks.com/idea-simple-responsive-spreadsheet/">the simplest responsive spreadsheet</a> possible with nothing more than CSS and so I wrote about it for CSS-Tricks. It’s kinda nifty that there’s a wide range of UI tricks that no longer require JavaScript — in this example I’ve used <code>position: sticky</code> to lock the table headers in place so that you can still easily scan the document without having to constantly scroll around.</p>
<p>Here’s an example of the final result that should work in the latest version of Chrome:</p>
<p data-height="500" data-theme-id="0" data-slug-hash="NwzObg" data-default-tab="result" data-user="robinrendle" data-embed-version="2" data-pen-title="A Simple Responsive Spreadsheet" class="codepen">See the Pen <a href="https://codepen.io/robinrendle/pen/NwzObg/">A Simple Responsive Spreadsheet</a> by Robin Rendle (<a href="https://codepen.io/robinrendle">@robinrendle</a>) on <a href="https://codepen.io/">CodePen</a>.</p>
<script async="" src="https://production-assets.codepen.io/assets/embed/ei.js"></script>
Setting a Typographic Scale with Sass Maps2017-11-25T05:06:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/typographic-scale-with-sass-maps/<p><em>The other day <a href="http://nicewebtype.com/">Tim Brown</a> noticed that this old post had been deleted and so I rescued it from the Wayback Machine. It’s a post from several years ago where I wrote about a new typesetting system that we had developed at <a href="http://erskine.simplygoodwork.com/">Erskine</a>. Please note that most of this code wasn’t written by me, but I did contribute to some of the underlying ideas; the credit should be directed towards Mat Hayward and Tom Davies of <a href="https://madebykind.com/">Kind</a> fame.</em></p>
<hr />
<p>Last month Tom <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170211113632/http://erskinedesign.com/blog/friendlier-colour-names-sass-maps/">discussed a new method</a> for organising colors with Sass lists and over the past few weeks I’ve been happily using it throughout our projects. This newfound ability to remember color settings all of a sudden feels like a weird front-end super power, and for larger projects this technique is sure to save us a large amount of time nipping back and forth between the module file we’re working on (like <code>_island.scss</code>) and the file which contains all of the color variable declarations. However, this technique is so useful that we’ve begun to wonder where else we can set data in a Sass list and consequently access it via a mixin.</p>
<p>After a bit of investigation I believe that we ought to use this technique to set a typographic scale. Yet before I explain how we can use Sass lists in this way I want to first describe a few underlying problems that have been nagging us lately when setting type with CSS:</p>
<h2 id="problem-1:-setting-margins-font-size-and-line-height-at-the-same-time" tabindex="-1">Problem #1: Setting margins, font-size and line-height at the same time <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/typographic-scale-with-sass-maps/#problem-1:-setting-margins-font-size-and-line-height-at-the-same-time" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>In order to align headings to the baseline we often set margins and padding values on the default <code>h1</code> through <code>h6</code> elements. Over time however, and especially on larger projects, we’ve noticed that this effects the reusability of these components. What happens if one of these headings are inside another module? Do they <em>always</em> need these specific margin/padding values? Probably not. Either way, we’ll end up resetting these defaults multiple times throughout the stylesheet like this (in the examples we’re going to keep things easier to read by setting everything in pixels but we usually set type with <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170211113632/http://snook.ca/archives/html_and_css/font-size-with-rem">rems</a>):</p>
<pre><code>h1, .h1{
margin-bottom: 35px;
padding-top: 3px;
}
.module__heading {
margin-bottom: 0;
padding-top: 0;
}
</code></pre>
<p>Ultimately we have to come to the conclusion that margin and padding values are entirely contextual. An <code>h1</code> will not always require these positional adjustments so we can supplant them onto the specific module that needs it (a class such as <code>.module__title</code> might be used instead.)</p>
<p>So which values really need to be defined when setting type? Well, whenever we set the <code>font-size</code> we probably want to change the <code>line-height</code> of the component too. Except perhaps in the rare circumstances of modules like buttons and text-fields, these values are almost always entwined with one another. So we need some kind of solution which only sets the font-size and line-height of a heading.</p>
<h2 id="problem-2:-inconsistently-setting-values" tabindex="-1">Problem #2: Inconsistently setting values <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/typographic-scale-with-sass-maps/#problem-2:-inconsistently-setting-values" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>More often than not this happens when a developer is in a rush and types in the wrong value when working in another partial. For example we’ve noticed code that creeps in like this:</p>
<pre><code>h1, .h1 {
font-size: 22px;
line-height: 25px;
}
.module__heading {
font-size: 21px;
line-height: 26px;
}
</code></pre>
<p>This can also happen when a designer wants to nudge the font-size and line-height ever so slightly (which is especially annoying when there is no documentation about this specific change in the stylesheet). However, this is unmaintainable over time as these minute adjustments are forks of the codebase and this makes it considerably more difficult to manage things in the future.</p>
<p>In upcoming projects our designers and developers won’t be able to make these tiny little aesthetic fixes on a module by module basis. We understand design’s relative importance here, but code maintenance is more important than a website looking 100% like the mockup and, as <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170211113632/http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldx4ZFxMEeo">Harry Roberts</a> argued in a recent talk, getting 80% of the way there with 20% of the code is always preferable in these situations.</p>
<p>So we need one set of global font-size and line-height values – a typographic scale – and deviations from it simply aren’t permitted.</p>
<h3 id="problem-3:-we-ought-to-configure-these-settings-with-each-typeface." tabindex="-1">Problem #3: We ought to configure these settings with each typeface. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/typographic-scale-with-sass-maps/#problem-3:-we-ought-to-configure-these-settings-with-each-typeface." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>Usually we don’t need the text face to be any bigger than the body text itself. Likewise, display faces used for large titles ought not to be smaller than a specific value in order to maintain legibility. In this case it’s obviously helpful to set specific font-size/line-height combinations for each individual typeface. Perhaps for a family like <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170211113632/https://typekit.com/fonts/ff-tisa-web-pro">FF Tisa</a> we would only need three size variations whereas with a sans-serif typeface such as <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170211113632/http://fontdeck.com/typeface/apercu">Apercu</a> we would need to set small, medium, large <em>and</em> display sizes. This means our typographic scales ought to be oriented around a specific type family.</p>
<h2 id="our-solution-(so-far)" tabindex="-1">Our solution (so far) <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/typographic-scale-with-sass-maps/#our-solution-(so-far)" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Now that we’ve outlined the problems I think it’s worthwhile to step you through our current setup. First we need to set the values for each specific font in a Sass map. If you haven’t heard about Sass maps before then I recommend <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170211113632/http://viget.com/extend/sass-maps-are-awesome">this tutorial by Viget</a> or checking out the maps section of this article called <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170211113632/http://davidwalsh.name/future-sass">Looking into the future of Sass</a>.</p>
<p>Looking back at the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170211113632/http://erskinedesign.com/blog/friendlier-colour-names-sass-maps/">color palettes</a> technique we can follow a similar hierarchical scale:</p>
<pre><code>$font-georgia: (
x-small: (
font-size: 13,
line-height: 16
),
small: (
font-size: 14,
line-height: 20
),
base: (
font-size: 16,
line-height: 18
),
mid: (
font-size: 18,
line-height: 20
),
mid-large: (
font-size: 20,
line-height: 26
),
large: (
font-size: 25,
line-height: 30
),
x-large: (
font-size: 35,
line-height: 39
)
);
</code></pre>
<p>It’s at this point where Tom butted in and began to wonder if you can add all sorts of other data for the typeface here too. Why set another variable that defines the font-stack which might be found in another file or partial? If we’re going to set specific typeface settings then why not apply those right here in the Sass map like so:</p>
<pre><code>$font-verdana: (
stack: "Verdana, sans-serif",
x-small: (
font-size: 12,
line-height: 16
)
);
</code></pre>
<p>This way all of the typeface data is in a single place. Now, before we go about setting up our functions we should probably consider how we want to use this data in a specific context. I think in practice this kind of <code>@include</code> statement would be nice:</p>
<pre><code>// scss
h1 {
@include font-scale(base);
}
// css output
h1 {
font-size: 16px;
line-height: 18px;
}
</code></pre>
<p>We’re making a few assumptions here. The <code>body</code> will probably have a default typeface set, so for the most part we won’t need to change the typeface all the time. In the rare cases that we do need to change it we probably want to do so like this:</p>
<pre><code>// scss
.component {
@include font-scale(x-small, $font-verdana);
}
// css output
.component {
font-family: "Verdana, sans-serif";
font-size: 12;
line-height: 16;
}
</code></pre>
<p>That’s a whole lot better than writing these values out individually. As we now have an idea of how we want to use this little mixin, we can start to define the functions step by step. The first function we’ll need is <code>_fontset-feature</code>:</p>
<pre><code>@function _fontset-feature($family, $feature, $set: 'base'){
$result: map-get(map-get($family, $set), $feature);
@return($result * 1px);
}
</code></pre>
<p>This function gets nested list data from our Sass map and appends ‘px’ to the unit. With this function we can then apply it to separate functions for setting the line-height and font-size:</p>
<pre><code>@function calc-font-size($family, $set) {
@return _fontset-feature($family, font-size, $set);
}
@function calc-line-height($family, $set) {
@return _fontset-feature($family, line-height, $set);
}
</code></pre>
<p>We can use these functions throughout the project to individually set this information, for instance in the case of a button when we don’t want to change line-height each time we set the font-size:</p>
<pre><code>.button--alpha {
font-size: calc-font-size(x-large);
}
.button--beta {
font-size: calc-font-size(large);
}
</code></pre>
<p>In those rare instances a developers wants to set a specific typeface we need a function to grab the font stack and remove the quotes surrounding it:</p>
<pre><code>@function _fontset-family($family) {
$result: map-get($family, stack);
@return unquote($result);
}
</code></pre>
<p>Finally we can use a font-scale mixin to combine these functions together:</p>
<pre><code>@mixin font-scale(
$font-size,
$family:$font-default,
$line-height:$font-size) {
font-size: calc-font-size($font-size, $family);
line-height: calc-line-height($line-height, $family);
@if $family != $font-default {
font-family: _fontset-family($family);
}
}
</code></pre>
<p>If we want the font-family to default to Georgia, without actually setting the CSS declaration for <code>font-family</code> each time, we can add the following default at the top of our Sass list:</p>
<pre><code>$font-default: $font-georgia;
</code></pre>
<p>And there we have it. We can set font-size, line-height and the font-family with the data from the Sass list and we have a single mixin to do all of the hard work for us. To see an example of how this might work we’ve made <a href="https://codepen.io/erskine/full/xEqFC">a little Pen</a> to help explain.</p>
<p>Although it doesn’t look like much at first, when scaled across a large front-end system this gives us an awful amount of power and efficiency out of the box. We can communicate with designers more clearly than before and it aids type setting consistency. Yay for Sass lists!</p>
<p><em>Update: We’ve gone ahead and made this into <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20170211113632/https://github.com/ultimate-package/tools.font-scale">a public repo</a> where you can see the most up to date version and help us make it even better.</em></p>
The Biodiversity Heritage Library2017-11-19T21:52:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-biodiversity-heritage-library/<p>The Biodiversity Heritage Library has made a huge stock of archival illustrations and imagery available on Flickr, as Josh Jones mentions in <a href="http://www.openculture.com/2017/11/two-million-wondrous-nature-illustrations-put-online-by-the-biodiversity-heritage-library.html">Open Culture</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary/albums">first stream</a>, currently at 122,281 images, has been carefully curated, and includes searchable galleries and albums divided by book title or subject, such as “<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary/albums/72157688236066255">Exotic botany illustrated</a>,” “<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary/albums/72157688410615325">The Birds of Australia v.1</a>,” and “<a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/biodivlibrary/albums/72157687529421761">Bats!</a>” The <a href="https://www.flickr.com/search/?tags=bookcollectionbiodiversity">second stream</a>, consisting of over 2 million images, is a massive grab-bag of photos, illlustrations from nature, advertisements, and imaginative renderings.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These images look like perfect stock photography for a whole range of uses and I can see using them as the basis of a talk’s slideshow or an essay.</p>
How to be both2017-11-18T05:04:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/how-to-be-both/<p>Ali Smith’s potent and luminous novel <em>How to be both</em> has been sitting on my desk for several days as I wait to return to it and write something even remotely coherent. But I realize now that will be impossible: <em>How to be both</em> is the hand-waving, self-stuttering kind of book where I cannot possibly hold myself back. It’s buoyant and important in the way a good novel always is but for reasons I don’t want to spoil. Instead I want to gurgle and babble, I want to flail the book in the air around my friends nonsensically, I want to speak in tongues and let everyone know that this is a novel that will haunt them.</p>
<p>Here’s one of its many playful tricks: the story is split into two halves and with each copy of the book Ali Smith devilishly switches the order of them. For example, the friend that recommended this book to me began their copy with the ending of mine and so I now feel that we read two entirely separate novels.</p>
<p>Somehow it works, somehow even delightfully.</p>
<p>But which part of my copy should I extract for you? Which part describes the book in all its color? I won’t spoil the story at all but I’ll give you a sense of the playfulness in Smith’s writing. She is the sort of writer that requires you <em>read</em> and pay attention to the smallest of details. Not in a pedantic, classical way but in the sort that encourages the reader to sit up straight, to pay close attention, to hold on tight.</p>
<p>Smith writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is a feeling thing, to be a painter of things: cause every thing, even an imagined or gone thing or creature or person has essence: paint a rose or a coin or a duck or a brick and you’ll feel it as sure as if a coin had a mouth and told you what it was like to be a coin...</p>
</blockquote>
Find the Beginning2017-11-05T19:01:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/find-the-beginning/<p>The NYT has a great post about Emily Wilson’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/magazine/the-first-woman-to-translate-the-odyssey-into-english.html">new translation of the Odyssey</a>, but here’s a snippet of the opening lines of the poem from <a href="https://twitter.com/catacalypto/status/926359329887764481">a real good thread</a> that I can’t stop thinking about:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Tell me about a complicated man.<br />
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost<br />
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,<br />
and where he went, and who he met, the pain<br />
he suffered in the storms at sea, and how<br />
he worked to save his life and bring his men<br />
back home. He failed to keep them safe; poor fools,<br />
they ate the Sun God’s cattle, and the god<br />
kept them from home. Now goddess, child of Zeus,<br />
tell the old story for our modern times.<br />
Find the beginning.</p>
</blockquote>
Feedback2017-11-01T05:29:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/feedback/<p>The more I learn about design, and the more experienced I become in the field, the frequency with which people ask for this sort of advice increases: <em>Can you review my code? How can I improve the UX of this feature? How would we implement something like this in our design system? What about the copy? The icons? The typesetting?</em></p>
<p>Amidst this flurry of questions I’ve noticed that there’s an art to giving good feedback. And I am, well, let’s say that there’s an opportunity for improvement here.</p>
<p>This is the problem: whenever I see bad design during critiques I get genuinely, emotionally upset because I want to list out every problem that I’m seeing and tear it apart. I want to smash the design to bits. “The hierarchy is bad!” I want to shout. “The words don’t make any sense!” I want to yell. And with teeth clenched I try to think of a way to casually mention “How on earth is this design supposed to work at smaller screen sizes?”</p>
<p>I recognize that this makes me a jerk and it’s led to all sorts of uncomfortable situations with other designers. In one particularly uncomfortable session I got so angry that the whole team looked at me slack-jawed.</p>
<p>This feeling I get reminds me of university where I had a rather unhealthy relationship with my colleagues and my work. Back then I had never opened InDesign or Photoshop, let alone sit in a room with a bunch of talented designers before. So it was a massive shock to the system when I had to reveal my work alongside folks that were extraordinarily skilled at visual, UX and graphic design. And the contrast between our work during those critiques was striking; whilst theirs was funny and clever, beautifully bound and typeset like an old German Bible, my work was, well, there were many, many opportunities for improvement there.</p>
<p>I learned how to take the punches though. When someone said that my work was trash I learned how to use that embarrassment and shame as fuel for returning to the work with renewed focus. That’s certainly not healthy but during the time I believed that method of teaching people was the only one. Kindness and hugs never seemed to work. Encouragement didn’t seem effective either. Shame and guilt always seemed to do the trick though. And if you have no shame or guilt then I found it was simply impossible to become a good designer. You flunked out and people stopped talking to you.</p>
<p>And now when a designer asks for feedback in a group there is this mean streak of mine that lurches up again. And quite frankly I don’t know how to deal with it. This is the first time at work where I no longer feel like a junior designer stuck at the bottom of the barrel, watching much more experienced folks than me do much better work. I’m no longer a rookie here, but that’s certainly no excuse.</p>
<p>So right now I’m just left with a handful of questions: how do I become more patient with the team? How do I let them know that I’m there to help? How can I explain that this work doesn’t cut it, and that we should go back to the drawing board?</p>
<p>In other words, how do I become a great designer without becoming a giant asshole?</p>
Songs of San Francisco2017-10-25T06:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/songs-of-san-francisco/<p>A moment; brief, and fabulously memorable.</p>
<p>Three of us were sat in a restaurant in the Haight enjoying drinks and a fine bookish conversation when it struck me: this was a moment that I’ll remember for the rest of my life. It’s not as important as a wedding, true. And it’s not as electric as when you meet someone for the first time and realize holy heck <em>this</em>, forever <em>this</em>. But it was a bookmark, of sorts. A moment that divides two periods of your life into clear, distinct and separate bits. That’s not because of the flavor of the conversation necessarily, although perhaps it was the drinks. Rather, I think this moment was so very important to me because we were all at this exciting moment in our lives, each of us appeared to be the student of the other in a way, and we were here to celebrate in that shared excitement.</p>
<p>One of us, a fabulously talented and experienced writer, about to publish a second novel. The next, publishing the first of what I hope to be only the beginning of a long and lucrative career of many books. And then there was me, with a grand total of zero books.</p>
<p>Somehow this gathering between us was funny, although I can’t quite describe why. There was this sense of history or something, the way that one writer had been influenced by the other. It was funny because each of us came from halfway across the world to find ourselves in this little bar excitedly talking about bundles of paper and how we were all trying to do the same thing, really, even if our work was wildly different.</p>
<p>As the evening crept up on us, our gathering disbanded, and I remember stepping out of the bar afterwards into the misty, cool evening. The Haight was deadly quiet and for the first time in a very long while I felt part of a community, a gang of friends, and I hoped to drink it all up before the moment faded.</p>
Green to Me2017-10-20T04:25:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/green-to-me/<p>Helena Fitzgerald on kudzu, money, sex and <a href="https://hazlitt.net/longreads/green-me">the color green</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I look for greens, teasing them out of photos, trusting them too much when I find them, giving far too much credit to any place that will offer me the greatest possible abundance of green. Like anything I love, I mistrust the color down to the fingernail-edges of all the feelings it engenders in me. The very fact that I love it so fiercely, that it compels me so again and again toward it, makes it both suspicious and sinister to me. What are the larger forces working to make this color seem like escape and solution, like a larger and better answer than words, like the final destination and the place to hide? What is green doing that makes it seem to matter so much?</p>
</blockquote>
Making the Clackity Noise2017-10-17T03:47:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/making-the-clackity-noise/<p>I still come back to this post by Merlin Mann called <a href="http://www.kungfugrippe.com/post/169873399/clackity-noise">Making the Clackity Noise</a>, years after I first read it, where he asks us all to write a little bit about our lives every day. Like small things; what we’re struggling with today, what we saw and felt, and the things that are making us happy:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I mean, Jesus Christ, people, LOOK. We have keyboards! Literally right in front of us. Right this second.</p>
<p>You have one, too, right? See it? Really look. No, look down. Down there. No, not that. That’s your enormous energy drink. No, not that either. That’s your ironic Garfield lamp.</p>
<p>Please use that keyboard to talk about your life sometimes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I agree wholeheartedly with Merlin, and I know I really ought to just write, but I was thinking about this the other day and realized that Twitter was always that space for me. It’s where I would point to things and yell “Hey look at this!” or murmur beneath my breath that “like, wow today was really tough.”</p>
<p>Now that same space feels inappropriate somehow. To treat that “What’s Happening” input as a free and open text editor, to just pour all your energy into it, seems like a waste of time. With all the other nightmarish things going on in the world, the tiny emotional grievances that bug me are somewhat trivial in comparison.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/Oct-16-2017%2021-27-40.gif" alt="Oct-16-2017 21-27-40.gif" /></p>
<p>This is going to sound odd. In fact it’s going to sound very odd, but I’m sort of finding that space to now be Instagram Stories. It’s where I’m watching my friends play on the beach or explore a cool new spot in a distant city or where complete strangers are highlighting parts of their favorite books and sharing them with me. There isn’t a clackity noise for sure. It’s not High Prose. They’re not working on a blog post that will become a novel. But it’s something that I’ve been missing from Twitter, that sort of immediacy, that feeling that there are a thousand smart and cuddly people in your pocket waiting to say hello.</p>
Notes on Adventures2017-09-26T07:21:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/adventures/<p>After more than a year of working on <em><a href="http://robinrendle.com/adventures">Adventures in Typography</a></em>, a weekly newsletter that I write about typography and design, I’ve figured out what it is or really what I want it to be. And so now I thought it’s as good a time as any to make a record of why I’m working on this side project, what’s successful about it, what I messed up and what I hope to accomplish in the future.</p>
<h2 id="audience:-who-do-i-want-to-read-it" tabindex="-1">Audience: Who do I want to read it? <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/adventures/#audience:-who-do-i-want-to-read-it" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Typically I think design writing is mostly a garbage topic for two reasons: first, it’s a field that encourages writers that are only interested in fame and fortune rather than serious research or good writing. It’s not just a problem with the sort of stuff you find on Medium, but almost everything that makes it to print, too. I often find that writing about design is treading well-worn and familiar ground or is boastful and arrogant instead.</p>
<p>Second, I think design writing is hot garbage because it encourages <em>boring</em> writing. The technical side of design, the really useful stuff like how fonts actually work, makes for extraordinarily dry reading which happens to be written without any charisma or flair for a group of readers with seemingly infinite patience. And I know that I’m not one of them.</p>
<p>So with <em>Adventures</em> I wanted to avoid the fame-riddled, Medium-esque writing and the boring stuff I read in books about typography. I want to welcome everyone to the world of typography, from amateurs to professional and experienced type designers. And that’s a tricky sort of balancing act.</p>
<h2 id="timeline:-how-long-should-it-take-to-read" tabindex="-1">Timeline: How long should it take to read? <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/adventures/#timeline:-how-long-should-it-take-to-read" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>The best constraint about the project is that I have to publish an adventure each Saturday evening or Sunday morning. This deadline gives me the incentive and the kick in the butt that I need to continuously write. After long enough it began to feel like exercise, in a good way until now it feels genuinely weird not writing <em>Adventures</em>. However, in the beginning my Saturday mornings were really quite frightful because I’d open up my laptop without a single clue as to what would be good enough.</p>
<p>Anyway, whenever I think of the ideal <em>Adventures</em> experience I think of someone reading their inbox early on a weekend morning with coffee in hand. The post should take no longer than ten or fifteen minutes to read, even if they happen to follow all the links that I scatter through it. Typically that means I hope to write about one story, or have a single continuous thread, running through it instead of a bunch of links dumped into a list. At the beginning of the project I constantly made the mistake of writing giant essays that tried to accomplish everything and that simply wasn’t scalable, or fun.</p>
<p>With <em>Adventures in Typography</em> I often think about what Reggie Fils-Aimé said about the design of Mario: <em>if it isn’t fun, then why bother?</em></p>
<h2 id="voice:-what-should-it-sound-like" tabindex="-1">Voice: What should it sound like? <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/adventures/#voice:-what-should-it-sound-like" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>I experimented with the tone for the longest time. At first I expected it to be serious and rather stately, but I found that it’s far too difficult to write something <em>serious</em> in the timeframe that I give myself. Plus, I know that if it was a Sunday morning I wouldn’t rush to my inbox to find a giant essay about type sitting there. But if there was a lighthearted story with a bunch of links to surf through then heck yes I most certainly would.</p>
<p>This leads to my second set of rules for <em>Adventures</em>: keep it jovial, lighthearted and brief. It took me yonks to learn that my voice in <em>Adventures</em> should sound just like I speak in real life; fast-paced, optimistic-as-all-heck and full of bumbling errors.</p>
<p>I then found myself enjoying the posts that were more like a stream of consciousness or an open notepad of all the messy thoughts bumping around in my head. With that, I began to take myself less seriously, and be less critical when it comes to the editing process. <em>It’s okay if the posts have spelling mistakes and it’s okay if they don’t quite lead anywhere.</em> This isn’t homework. It’s a clunky, excitable email sent to a close friend.</p>
<p>My general goal is this: if a single intelligible and kind word can be wrenched out of me as I write that particular week’s letter than that’s a fine adventure for me. And I hope it is for you, as well.</p>
Books as Work2017-09-11T04:26:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/books-as-work/<p>There’s this troubling belief when just starting out as a writer that your favorite texts aren’t just bits of paper strung together but are instead <em>works of art</em>; ethereal and everlasting. This is constantly reinforced in popular culture, at university and even by many of the authors themselves. There are Fine Ages of Literature. There are the Classics. There is the English Canon. There is the Great American Novel. There are times and places that are more important than other times and places.</p>
<p>But the more I learn about writing, both from friends that have published books and from distant yet-to-be colleagues in the writing game, is that it simply isn’t healthy to see <em>books as works of art</em> — made by a single artistic genius in complete isolation. This is because elevating them to the status of mythos makes the <em>work</em> of book writing even harder than it really is. It makes us less capable of picking up a pen, of making notes, of having the patience and confidence to start typing, clicking, designing and building our own books.</p>
<p>We can’t afford to see books as art if we want to make a contribution, whatever size that might be, to the world of bookmaking. Rather, we must see books as work instead.</p>
Ways of Reading2017-09-01T04:59:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/ways-of-reading/<p>I often think about a post that Mandy Brown wrote way back in 2009 called <a href="http://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/ways-of-reading/">Ways of Reading</a>. In that post Mandy argues that we should “always read with a pen in hand” and “think of the text as the starting point for your own words” – which, of course, I adore:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Reading and writing are not discrete activities; they occur on a continuum, with reading at one end, writing at the other. The best readers spend their time somewhere in between.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So I’ve been writing messy scribbles in my books ever since. In fact I can judge a really good book by the number of highlights I leave behind in my wake. The more !!!’s and ???’s the better.</p>
Sourdough2017-08-30T04:47:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/sourdough/<p>Robin Sloan’s <a href="https://www.robinsloan.com/books/sourdough/"><em>Sourdough</em></a> is a precious thing. It’s a novel set in the Bay Area about the making of a mysterious bread and the programming of an artificial intelligence for a robotic hand. I would mention something more about the protagonist or the main drive of the plot but I don’t want to spoil even a moment of the book. But to be quite honest though, I was a little worried before I picked up my copy since Robin’s previous work with <a href="https://www.robinsloan.com/books/penumbra/"><em>Mr Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore</em></a> and its prequel <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ajax-Penumbra-1969-Robin-Sloan/dp/1782395172"><em>Ajax Penumbra: 1969</em></a> are amongst my very favorites. So there was a niggling concern in the back of my mind; would this story be as delightful as those two previous thrillers?</p>
<p>Well, I’m delighted to report that yes, <em>Sourdough</em> is unequivocally brilliant.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/sourdough-cover-animation.gif" alt="sourdough-cover-animation.gif" /></p>
<p>The only thing I’ll mention about it is that, on returning to Robin’s prose, it’s sort of like picking up a P.G. Wodehouse story once again. Somehow you’ve forgotten how stories are capable of being jovial, light hearted or funny and you suddenly realize how not every story needs to be a violent, dystopian apocalypse where monsters rip each other to pieces in every scene. Instead, in a delightful twist, everyone and everything in the universe of <em>Sourdough</em> buzzes with enthusiasm. And it’s this sort of Parks and Recreation-esque sensibility that makes it almost impossible to put down — I think I read the book in three big gulps (which is especially rare for me these days).</p>
<p>In short, you should preorder Robin’s book immediately.</p>
<p>Also, attention San Francisco folk! Robin is speaking at Green Apple Books on the Park on 9/7 and I will most certainly be there to hear tales of books, machine learning and this mysterious sourdough bread.</p>
The Fire Next Time2017-08-27T20:05:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-fire-next-time/<p>I’ve been reading James Baldwin’s <em>The Fire Next Time</em> over the past week and it’s surprising to me that I don’t find his work as celebrated as it ought to be. I’ve watched some of his debates and read a couple of his books and each time I’m in complete awe of Baldwin’s prose and the eloquent way in which he tears apart injustice. The book though is a collection of essays on racial discrimination, slavery, white guilt, Reparations and the relationship between Islam, Christianity and the African-American community in 1960s America. But it’s difficult to pick a section of the book to talk about because every word is like a carefully sharpened blade.</p>
<p>Take this example which follows a description of Baldwin describing the injustices committed against African-Americans after they returned from WWII:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>And all this is happening in the richest and freest country in the world, and in the middle of the twentieth century. The subtle and deadly change of heart that might occur in you would be involved with the realization that a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked but only that they be spineless.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is where I might make the comparison to modern times but it would hurt far too much to do so. This next section is likewise difficult to chew because of how impossibly relatable it is:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. You would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one’s sense of one’s own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man’s world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But as I read more of Baldwin’s work the more I realize why he’s not as celebrated in America as much as Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X – it’s because of his opinions on religion:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being (and let us not ask whether or not this is possible; I think we must <em>believe</em> it is possible) must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.</p>
</blockquote>
The Lost Cause Rides Again2017-08-11T08:35:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-lost-cause-rides-again/<p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/08/no-confederate/535512/">Ta-Nehisi Coates on the American Civil War</a> and <em>Confederate</em>, the new tv show by HBO:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For while the Confederacy, as a political entity, was certainly defeated, and chattel slavery outlawed, the racist hierarchy which Lee and Davis sought to erect, lives on. It had to. The terms of the white South’s defeat were gentle. Having inaugurated a war which killed more Americans than all other American wars combined, the Confederacy’s leaders were back in the country’s political leadership within a decade. Within two, they had effectively retaken control of the South.</p>
<p>Knowing this, we do not have to wait to point out that comparisons between <em>Confederate</em> and <em>The Man in the High Castle</em> are fatuous. Nazi Germany was also defeated. But while its surviving leadership was put on trial before the world, not one author of the Confederacy was convicted of treason. Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremberg. Confederate General John B. Gordon became a senator. Germany has spent the decades since World War II in national penance for Nazi crimes. America spent the decades after the Civil War transforming Confederate crimes into virtues. It is illegal to fly the Nazi flag in Germany. The Confederate flag is enmeshed in the state flag of Mississippi.</p>
<p>The symbols point to something Confederate’s creators don’t seem to understand—the war is over for them, not for us.</p>
</blockquote>
The Sutro Tower2017-08-05T02:45:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-sutro-tower/<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/IMG_0531.jpg" alt="IMG_0531.jpg" /></p>
<p>My desk faces west towards the Sutro Tower and to be quite honest I only picked this apartment because of the tower and how it looms above Twin Peaks (those lumpy bumpy ridges above). As soon as I walked in the front door I knew that this would be the window where I write. I knew that from this perch I’d write a million words as I looked at the sunset and, over the years, I knew that the Sutro Tower would turn out to be my dearest writing compatriot.</p>
<p>But over time my relationship with the tower has changed and I think that’s because the San Francisco peninsula often feels as if it’s a plate spinning at a million miles an hour. The culture, the population, the tech boom, they all do their best to keep this plate spinning as fast as they can. But the Sutro Tower, to me at least, is the stick holding it all together and makes sure that the city doesn’t one day break off and twirl into the sky.</p>
You Say Data, I Say System2017-07-23T18:59:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/you-say-data-i-say-system/<p><a href="https://hackernoon.com/you-say-data-i-say-system-54e84aa7a421">Jer Thorp on data systems</a> and how bias, whether intentional or not, affects the representation of that data:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Whenever you look at data — as a spreadsheet or database view or a visualization, you are looking at an artifact of such a system. What this diagram doesn’t capture is the immense branching of choice that happens at each step along the way. [...]</p>
<p>The next time you read a story with the word data in the headline, swap it out with data system. When you see a data visualization, think of it instead as a data system visualization. If the government proposes new policies around personal data, think about them instead as policies about people, and the data systems which they inhabit. Widening your thinking in this fashion will also allow you to engage in broader criticism of data systems and those who are authoring and exercising them.</p>
</blockquote>
Cassandra Plays the Stock Market2017-07-22T06:56:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/cassandra-plays-the-stock-market/<p>Tim Maly on <a href="http://quietbabylon.com/2017/cassandra-plays-the-stock-market/">the election</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit hanging around the online communities of the kind of people we are worried about reaching here, and I am here to tell you: They are using their critical thinking skills.</p>
<p>They are fully literate in concepts like bias and in the importance of interrogating sources. They believe very much in the power of persuasion and the dangers in propaganda and a great many of them believe that we are the ones who have been behaving uncritically and who have been duped. They think that we are the unbelieving victims of fraud.</p>
<p>Which is not to set up some kind of false equivalency between sides. But I do want us to consider the possibility that we don’t need to talk across that barrier, and that it might not be possible to talk across it. That we need to consider that if it’s true that vast swaths of the voting populace are unbelieving victims of fraud, that there’s not much we can do for them. That we may need instead to work to invigorate our allies, discourage our enemies, and save the persuasion for people right on the edge.</p>
</blockquote>
An Incomplete List of Mistakes2017-07-01T07:55:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/an-incomplete-list-of-mistakes/<p>What’s your favorite website? Which is the one above all the others that you think about from time to time? In fact, which website do you not only think about but <em>obsess</em> over? I don’t want you to think about which website is the most useful, or the one that’s changed your life the most. I’m thinking more like a big web app that made you giddy or a bloated, scrolly, complex behemoth that redefined what a website is for you, or perhaps just a small-scale publication that’s consistently swift and deft.</p>
<p>My favorite website, my favorite block of hypertext, is firmly in the small-scale variety. It’s an old-school webpage called <a href="https://wiki.csswg.org/ideas/mistakes">An Incomplete List of Mistakes in the Design of CSS</a> that can be found on the CSS Working Group wiki. Those are the fellows that ultimately plan and design the CSS language before it’s accepted by browser manufacturers like Apple and Google.</p>
<p>This list is interesting to me for a number of reasons though. First, these are the problems that I encounter on a daily basis as a web designer. And this list of mistakes is something that every web designer worth their salt has had to learn, figure out work arounds for, and then memorize. For instance, there’ll be moments during the design stage of a project where I realize that something is entirely impossible, or simply highly impractical, thanks to the way that CSS was originally designed and how it has changed over time.</p>
<p>What interests me most about this list is that these mistakes are truly permanent. Once all these errors leaked out of the CSS specification, were then built into each of our browsers and then shared between millions of devices, they become insurmountable errors that can never really be fixed. If they were removed or altered in any way then browsers could render millions of websites incorrectly overnight. No, the risk is far too great and the problems are buried far too deep in the stack for anyone to deal with now.</p>
<p>This is why I love this webpage so very much, because it’s an outline of the evolutionary flaws in the technology that powers the web and it’s also a cautionary tale; we should move slowly and deliberately when building new features into the heart of our browsers since changing them is so very difficult.</p>
<p>So what do we now?</p>
<p>We have to be careful as we build the web and make sure that we avoid contributing our own work to this infamous list of mistakes.</p>
With New Browser Tech, Apple Preserves Privacy and Google Preserves Trackers2017-06-23T06:20:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/with-new-browser-tech-apple-preserves-privacy-and-google-preserves-trackers/<p>Writing for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/with-new-browser-tech-apple-preserves-privacy-google-preserves-trackers">Alan Toner describes the current state of advertising on the web</a> and criticizes Google for not just allowing but almost encouraging advertisers to surveil users on the web:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Ad quality needs to improve and advertisers must abandon any attempt to hijack our attention with disruptive audio, flashing animation, or screen takeovers. But this alone will not win back the trust of users alienated by an ad system run amok. Users should be given more control over the ads they are shown, and their Do Not Track demands must be honored. The web should be about opening up new possibilities both individually and collectively, but the feeling of being monitored can create unease that information about us could be misused or revealed without our permission. Since the Web has become central to human thought and communication, surveilling it without an opt-out is a fundamental intrusion into human cognition and conversation. Any plan to make ads “better” that lacks a core privacy component is fundamentally broken.</p>
</blockquote>
Berlin, indefinitely2017-06-08T06:43:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/berlin-indefinitely/<p>A train. A tunnel. Oakland. Walking in the dim light. A bar. Paper (a book). Beer. Basketball on the screen. A small crowd. An argument at the other end of the bar. Singing outside. A birthday. An hour or two. Hannah. A smile. Hugging. Giggles. Small, but easy talk. A silver ring on her index finger. Jean jacket. Her? She builds things. Jewellery. Piercings. A forklift certification. Art studio. Three tattoos. One bad. A redesign and re-ink is in the works. Me? The book. The work. The web. The charming British thing. A walk around the block. A Mexican joint. Burritos. Comic books. Transmetropolitan. A walk to her car. It’s dirty. She tidies up and for the first time I notice her body. A short drive in the dark. Podcasts. Song Exploder. Her place. More giggles. A story. A famous neighbour, who happens to be one of my favourite writers, is her friend. I see this guy’s place. His house. His lawn. That’s where <em>he</em> lives. Goosebumps. Her front door. The jangling of keys. A dog called Bear. A kitchen. Wine. An evening. A morning. A story. Her? Berlin, indefinitely. Me? San Francisco, I guess.</p>
Between Trident Lakes and Technology Drive2017-05-09T02:53:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/between-trident-lakes-and-technology-drive/<p>Ingrid Burrington is one of my favorite writers and here she’s jotted down notes from a talk she made on <a href="http://lifewinning.com/2017/05/05/trident.html">data centers and power</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When I’ve gone on data center tours I know most of this security theater isn’t really for me, but there is a subtle nudging request for validation in these design choices. In colocation data centers, it’s for someone else’s middle management–potential clients who need to be impressed. In purpose-built data centers like Facebook’s, it’s for a general public that uses but maybe does not love Facebook. Facebook’s desire to be loved and trusted has always struck me as sort of overcompensating. The public image of the data center is about reassuring someone (clients, themselves) that this ridiculous massive human project of the networked world is secure and certain and inevitable and perpetual, and by extension they are secure and certain and inevitable and perpetual. And, it is worth noting, privately held. There is a difference between infrastructure and public works, and spending time with Internet infrastructure is a reminder that the anxieties over walled gardens and media manipulation and equal access kind of missed the extent to which the Internet was never “ours” to begin with.</p>
</blockquote>
Blüte, Gerüst2017-04-16T08:35:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/blute-gerust/<p>Philip Smith made <a href="https://philsmith.bandcamp.com/album/bl-te-ger-st">a lovely recording of him playing piano</a>, but the story behind the recording is just as charming as the music itself:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Yesterday, on my way home, I went into a bar-restaurant I'd never been into before. There was a goat above the door, and I’d spotted a piano inside. I asked if I could play it and the woman asked what I play. I said “Richtung jazz”, or something similar. Her name is Dunya and mine is Phil.</p>
<p>Dunya said they do have a beautiful piano stool, but for now I sat on one of the wooden chairs. It was a Friday afternoon and people were out in the garden. It was the warmest day of the year so far. It’s the kind of place where everyone seems to work there. Familial.</p>
<p>I gave a fifty minute concert in two halves. They poured me a drink in the middle. Dunya asked how I found them. I said I just walked past. She smiled and said, “That’s how I want it.”</p>
</blockquote>
How Google Book Search Got Lost2017-04-16T08:32:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/how-google-book-search-got-lost/<p>Scott Rosenberg <a href="https://backchannel.com/how-google-book-search-got-lost-c2d2cf77121d">on Google Books</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...Google started Books with a “better ask forgiveness than permission” attitude that’s common today in the world of startups. In a sense, the company behaved like the Uber of intellectual property — a kind of read-sharing service — while expecting to be seen the way it saw itself, as a beneficent pantheon of wizards serving the entire human species. It was naive, and the stubborn opposition it aroused came as a shock.</p>
<p>But Google took away a lesson that helped it immeasurably as it grew and gained power: Engineering is great, but it’s not the answer to all problems. Sometimes you have to play politics, too — consult stakeholders, line up allies, compromise with rivals. As a result, Google assembled a crew of lobbyists and lawyers and approached other similar challenges — like navigating YouTube’s rights maze — with greater care and better results. It grew up. It came to understand that it could shoot for the moon, but it wouldn’t always get there.</p>
</blockquote>
Drawing Words and Writing Pictures: An Appreciation of Maira Kalman2017-04-16T07:27:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/drawing-words-and-writing-pictures-an-appreciation-of-maira-kalman/<p>Frank Chimero on <a href="https://magenta.as/drawing-words-and-writing-pictures-an-appreciation-of-maira-kalman-b7a718eda468">text and image</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Go take a look at your bookshelf: most books are seas of text without pictures. When a book does have imagery, they are marooned onto their own page, or the text tiptoes alongside the image, reticent and scared of contact. Even this little post is guilty. Images and text are frequently described as natural partners, but there is very little intimacy in how they are treated. Like an old married couple, they sleep in separate beds.</p>
<p>Blending image and text requires a different kind of authorship. It can be done in teams, but I admire individuals who both write and draw to produce works completely their own. I’ve come to call it “drawing words and writing pictures.“</p>
</blockquote>
Regarding Gnomon2017-04-10T06:37:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/regarding-gnomon/<p>Nick Harkaway on <a href="http://www.nickharkaway.com/regarding-gnomon/">the experience of writing his latest novel</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This was like weaving a tapestry thread by thread while holding the entire design in your head, and my head just wasn’t big enough. Meanings intersected with other meanings, with consequences. I had to go back, again and again, re-work, re-conceive, re-imagine. Sure, yeah, I know: writing is re-writing. I’m familiar with the re-write. This was more like starting a new book every four months or so. The number of plotlines and their interactions meant a kind of exponential multiplication of possibility. I’d made a maze in my own mind and I kept getting lost in it. The book was smarter than I was.</p>
</blockquote>
Letter from a Drowned Canyon2017-04-08T01:07:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/letter-from-a-drowned-canyon/<p>In <em><a href="https://story.californiasunday.com/drowned-canyon">Letter from a Drowned Canyon</a></em> Rebecca Solnit marks a super interesting distinction between being a <em>conservationist</em> and being an <em>environmentalist</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the late 1950s, the news about radioactive fallout across the United States from the aboveground nuclear tests at the Nevada site was one reminder of systemic connection; pesticides were another. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, <em>Silent Spring</em>, made it clear that our modern poisons spread beyond the places to which they were applied and ended up in us as well as in wilderness. What you did here mattered there. When you switch from thinking about protecting particular places to address the interconnectedness of all things, you turn from a conservationist into an environmentalist.</p>
</blockquote>
Mighty Fine Content that I am Consuming Online™2017-03-15T06:27:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/mighty-fine-content-that-i-am-consuming-online/<p>I’ve been reading a lot of great things via the magic of hyperlinks lately and just wanted to quickly jot down everything as best I could. I hope you enjoy reading this lot as much as I did.</p>
<hr />
<p>Here’s a great post by Tim Carmody on <a href="http://beltmag.com/sorry-called-blue-states-dont-get-walk-away/">how Blue-America should treat Red-America</a> now after the election:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In America — whether in its cities, states, or the entire country, the rich and poor of every race, religion, and gender, gay, straight, and nonbinary, and yes, citizen and noncitizen — we are all one body. Our fates are locked together. The red states feed the people of the blue; the blue states shelter the people of the red. The world, with its many members, is all one body. When we hurt or misunderstand each other, we only hurt and misunderstand ourselves.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>On a similar note: I had just moved to San Francisco when the Brexit vote came in and was walking around with some friends when one of them pinched me. “The vote just came in,” she said. “And I’m so sorry.”</p>
<p>But there was this little part of me that was like <em>good riddance</em>. If my home country wants to mutilate itself then so be it – I’ve chosen America as my new home. And yet six months later my new elective country...well, yeah. I feel pretty guilty about feeling that way now.</p>
<hr />
<p>Nicole Zhu on <a href="https://medium.com/@nz/aesthetics-and-absence-asian-american-representation-onscreen-639222812a1b#.asfjpq4gx">the lack of Asian American representation in films and TV</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Asian Americans are never seen as top-billed actors and actresses because they are not given the chance, not even in their own stories. We lose out on both the money and the prominence that it takes to convince studios that we are worth investing in, as well as the optics and representation it takes to convince audiences that we can be reflected meaningfully in the entertainment we consume. Asian culture, aesthetics, stories, and stereotypes are everywhere, but god forbid a movie contains multidimensional Asian characters who might be superheroes or romantic leads or tortured billionaire geniuses or carry multimillion dollar franchises or have their own fucking Lego figures...</p>
</blockquote>
<hr />
<p>I particularly enjoyed this piece by Ross Andersen for the Atlantic called <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/pleistocene-park/517779/"><em>Welcome to the Pleistocene Park</em></a>. Andersen interviews a bunch of scientists that are hoping to revive the wooly mammoth in a bid to save the world from ecological disaster. It makes for super interesting reading:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The mammoth’s extinction may have been our original ecological sin. When humans left Africa 70,000 years ago, the elephant family occupied a range that stretched from that continent’s southern tip to within 600 miles of the North Pole. Now elephants are holed up in a few final hiding places, such as Asia’s dense forests. Even in Africa, our shared ancestral home, their populations are shrinking, as poachers hunt them with helicopters, GPS, and night-vision goggles. If you were an anthropologist specializing in human ecological relationships, you may well conclude that one of our distinguishing features as a species is an inability to coexist peacefully with elephants.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr />
<p>There’s a lot to scoff at in this post about how folks are <a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/homestead/article131350924.html">turning a library into an amusement park-esque experience called a ‘Cybrary’</a> – bright lights! e-books! no shushing! – but I will always back any project that encourages kids to experiment with reading:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Christopher recalled a comment by Caitlin Moran, an English writer: “The library is a cathedral of the mind, a hospital for the soul, and a theme park for the imagination,” Christopher quoted. “And that’s what we’re going for.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Good on ’em. If the whacky techno-mumble-jumble gets even one kid to read Animorphs or The Subtle Knife then that’s a success in my book.</p>
<hr />
<p>Helen Rosner describes <a href="http://www.eater.com/2017/2/28/14753248/trump-steak-well-done-ketchup-personality">how #45 eats his steak</a>, and does so in a way that reveals everything about him:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A person who won’t eat his steak any doneness but well is a person who won’t entertain the notion that there could be a better way; a person who blankets the whole thing in ketchup (a condiment that adds back much of the moisture, sweetness, and flavor that the overcooking removed in the first place) is always going to fix his problems by making them worse. A person who refuses to try something better is a person who will never make things good.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr />
<p>Writing for the NYT, Kenneth Chang describes <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/science/trappist-1-exoplanets-nasa.html?_r=0">the wonderful discovery of the Trappist-1 system</a> — seven Earth-size planets that might very well have life on them:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“If you’re looking for complex biology, intelligent aliens that might take a long time to evolve from pond scum, older [suns] could be better,” said Seth Shostak, an astronomer at the Seti Institute in Mountain View, Calif. “It seems a good bet that the majority of clever beings populating the universe look up to see a dim, reddish sun hanging in their sky...”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Just...yikes.</p>
<hr />
<p>Helen McDonald, also writing for the NYT, wrote about <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/05/magazine/in-search-of-post-brexit-england-and-swans.html?nytmobile=0">post Brexit England and swans</a>. My favourite bit of the whole piece is when Helen writes about a painting:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Swan Upping at Cookham” was painted by the mystical, eccentric English artist Stanley Spencer, who left it half-finished in his bedroom in Cookham when he went off to war in 1915, and the knowledge that it was there sustained him over the next three years. He longed to explain to his military superiors that he couldn’t take part in attacks because he had a painting to finish at home. On his return, he picked it up. “Well there we were looking at each other,” he wrote in his diary. “It seemed unbelievable but it was a fact. Then I wondered if what I had just come from was fact & caught sight of the yellow of the Lyddite or whatever the Bulgars used in their shells on my fingers & finger nails.”</p>
<p>He finished his painting. But the war is caught up in it. Years before he had laid complex, sunlit ripples on the river below the bridge, but the lower postwar parts of the picture are lifeless, muddy and dark. Boats are painted odd colors and have the wrong shapes, his familiar childhood landscape coursing with new and ominous strangeness.</p>
</blockquote>
How to ride a motorcycle in California2017-03-10T05:25:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/how-to-ride-a-motorcycle-in-california/<p>Considering I’m from the UK there were a few peculiar obstacles I had to circumnavigate before I could get back to riding a motorcycle, hence I thought it might be helpful for others if I jotted that whole process down. At the beginning it was pretty complicated and strange because I simply couldn’t find any info out there for me. So hopefully this guide is of use to you, fellow motorcycle enthusiast.</p>
<h2 id="step-1:-what-do-you-need" tabindex="-1">Step #1: What Do You Need? <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/how-to-ride-a-motorcycle-in-california/#step-1:-what-do-you-need" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>OK, you’ve just moved to California from another country and you want to ride a motorcycle. Neat! If you already have a motorcycle license from your country of origin then you’ll need to get an M1 California driving license after 3 months of living in the States.</p>
<p>If you don’t have a license in your country of origin then you’ll also need to get an M1 license. To get it you’ll just need to complete a weekend-long driving course and a multiple choice written exam.</p>
<h2 id="step-2:-booking-your-lesson" tabindex="-1">Step #2: Booking your Lesson <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/how-to-ride-a-motorcycle-in-california/#step-2:-booking-your-lesson" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>The state of California requires you to take a bunch of tests on a motorcycle at the DMV in order to get a license. However! You can take a two day course called an <a href="https://www.chp.ca.gov/programs-services/programs/california-motorcyclist-safety/california-motorcyclist-training">MTC</a> which is about five hours of classroom teaching and ten hours of riding inside a private, fenced off area. That sounds like it’s a lot but it’s really just a weekend. If you take this course then you’ll get a waiver that you can take to the DMV which will excuse you from any road test but you’ll still need to take the written exam at the DMV.</p>
<p>Why’s that the case? Well, I’m not entirely sure but the MTC test is much easier than the slow riding stuff they’ll get you to do at the DMV.</p>
<p>So! I booked a course with <a href="http://www.motorcycleschool.com/">Bay Area Motorcycle Training</a>. In total, this was two days of training and it cost me a little over $200 — it was broken up into four classes over the weekend. Pretty simple.</p>
<h2 id="step-3:-buying-gear" tabindex="-1">Step #3: Buying Gear <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/how-to-ride-a-motorcycle-in-california/#step-3:-buying-gear" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>The course that I took provided the bike and the helmet but they required that I bring the following along:</p>
<ul>
<li>Boots that cover the ankle</li>
<li>Jeans</li>
<li>Jacket</li>
<li>Motorcycle gloves</li>
<li>Identification (I used my UK motorcycle license)</li>
</ul>
<p>I already had some boots that were okay but the rest I needed to pick up from a local store. So next stop: <a href="https://www.cyclegear.com/store-location/cycle-gear-san-francisco-california-store-40">Cycle Gear</a>! This is a big franchise out here that sells all sorts of motorcycle gear and the one I went to had a pretty reasonable selection of quality stuff.</p>
<p>If you’re unfamiliar with buying the right clothes for riding then make sure to take it easy at first and don’t rush ahead – there’s no need to buy it all in one go since lots of equipment can be bought cheaply and slowly over time. With that said though, I kinda knew what I wanted. I bought a Dianese jacket for all seasons and a pair of Alpine Stars gloves. After the test, and a couple of weeks later, I went back to Cycle Gear and bought <a href="https://youtu.be/cyFO25x3bLE">a Shoei RF-1200 helmet</a>. All of this came to about $800 but that’s only because motorcycles will be my primary method of transport so everything needs to stand up to rainy weekends and cold summer nights in California. I also know that this stuff is going to last me <em>years</em>.</p>
<p>So this gear had to work for me in all weather and temperature conditions because it’s my one and only method of transport — splurging was kinda ok. But don’t feel like you need to spend lots on a cool jacket. You really don’t: a good helmet starts around $200 and a nice jacket can be found at around the $250-$300 range.</p>
<p>Once you’ve got your jacket, gloves, jeans and boots together now all you’ll need to do is the weekend course.</p>
<h2 id="step-4:-taking-the-test" tabindex="-1">Step #4: Taking the Test <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/how-to-ride-a-motorcycle-in-california/#step-4:-taking-the-test" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>I’m not sure if this is the case for all test centers, but I had to sign a pretty serious waiver that described how driving a motorcycle would likely cause immediate death: take these notes seriously but don’t be frightened off by them.</p>
<p>Be sure to take the waiver that they send you in an email to the first lesson, along with your ID. I had to bring my UK driver’s license to prove that I was a human boy.</p>
<p>The classroom stuff is surprisingly easy because they’re methodical and spell everything out slowly. On the Sunday they then asked me to sit a multiple choice test that just repeats everything they mentioned — I was a little nervous about it because the test in the UK is pretty difficult but this one was a piece of cake in comparison.</p>
<p>So for the driving part of the course I spent that time on a Suzuki dirtbike but the strange thing about the test in California is that they don’t upgrade your bike during the course. In the UK you have to learn on a 250cc, 600cc and then finally an 800cc bike. And that makes a whole bunch of sense because a 250cc is a completely different vehicle to an 800cc. But that’s besides the point, you’ll only be on one bike and then at the end you’ll take a test on the same bike that lasts about 30mins.</p>
<p>The test that I took at the end of the two day course was absurdly easy, too. And if ya fail one part of it, don’t fret. It’s highly unlikely that you’ll fail this thing. Seriously. I cocked it up pretty bad and they still gave me a license.</p>
<p>And remember to be punctual and to bring your boots, gloves, jeans, ID and jacket to the test otherwise they won’t let you on the bike and you’ll have to come back and do the test again.</p>
<h2 id="step-5:-the-written-test" tabindex="-1">Step #5: The Written Test <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/how-to-ride-a-motorcycle-in-california/#step-5:-the-written-test" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>A week after passing the two day course I received a form in the post as well as a card which I then had to take to an appointment at the DMV. Make an appointment if you can, but if not then turn up to the DMV a little before 7am and bring an audiobook with you. That way you’ll be at the head of the line at 8am when the DMV opens. It sucks, but that’s the least suckiest option. Booking an appointment isn’t likely to help because sometimes you have to wait <em>months</em> for a spot.</p>
<p>Once you’re at the DMV you’ll then need to fill out another form, do an eye exam, get your photograph taken and take what’s called a “written test” but it’s really just a simple multiple choice exam on a touch screen. That takes about ten minutes and weirdly enough you’ll have unlimited retries so it’s not anywhere near as intense as the one in the UK (where during a busy spell it can take a month to book a new one if you fail and you will most certainly fail it the first time). Anyway, you can take the written test before you get your card and form from the MTC but I’d recommend limiting the number of trips to the DMV as much as you can.</p>
<p>This is where I got into a bit of trouble though: I selected “Motorcycle” license on the form but the folks at the DMV applied me for a car license too. So double check to make sure that you’re only applying for an M1 license if that’s all you want. Because otherwise they’ll force you to come back and redo the form or they’ll get ya to come back with a car to do a driving test. Neither of those things are ideal, so beware. When I asked around at the DMV they all had me believe I ought to take a road test with them in a car before I could get my bike license but that’s simply not true. Misinformation is rampant at the DMV. If you want to just drive a motorcycle and get a license for that first then that’s totally possible.</p>
<p>Also if they’ve accidentally signed you up for both a car and motorcycle license, you’ll need to stand your ground a little bit without being a jerk. Thanks to this cock up I had to refill a motorcycle license application form which took several hours of waiting in line and faffing about.</p>
<p>OK, so this is where things get confusing.</p>
<p>I was told that because I’m a foreigner without a California driving license then I would have to come back and do all the tests that the course was supposed to waive me through. So after I applied for the license I was given a temporary permit and told that I’d have to return and take the damn road test at the DMV. So I got in contact with the <a href="http://bayridersgroup.com/">Bay Riders Group</a> to hire a motorcycle for the test and did an extra day’s training (the DMV test is a lot of slow driving stuff that every rider forgets with time) but once I got to the DMV they told me that the MTC waiver was still okay. All I’d need to do is drive around the block to test my road knowledge. Three left-hand turns later they gave me a slip saying that I had passed.</p>
<p>So compared to the UK, this was a thoroughly baffling process. I was told a million different things by everyone and had to go to the DMV a lot more than what was necessary. For all this confusion and foolishness, I was handed a temporary permit after a simple road test and in a couple of weeks I should get my real license in the mail.</p>
<hr />
<p>Hopefully this helps you figure things out — the lack of information online is infuriating, without even mentioning the conflicting advice that I found everywhere. In short the process is pretty simple. Don’t panic, follow these steps, and you should be on the road within no time at all.</p>
The CSS-Tricks Newsletter2017-02-27T03:03:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/css-tricks-newsletter/<p>For a good long while I’ve been helping out with the <a href="https://css-tricks.com/newsletters/">CSS-Tricks newsletter</a> every week(ish). Each issue is jam packed with our thoughts about front-end development and design.</p>
<p>We try pretty hard to make sure there’s something interesting going on and even though we talk about the latest news we hope to deliver something more than just a bundle of links each week. There are stories about how the team has messed up and what we’re working on next. It’s fun! So if you happen to be interested in the web then I’d suggest you <a href="https://css-tricks.com/newsletters/#mc-embedded-subscribe-form">sign up</a> and follow along.</p>
In Praise of Green Light2017-01-07T01:31:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/in-praise-of-green-light/<p>I think about pain by separating it into two categories; High and Low.</p>
<p>High-level pain is the sort that we feel on a daily basis. It’s the emotional tide that we’re riding at this very moment. When someone makes us angry or upset, when we’re annoyed by the weather or when we hear bad news from afar, those are all jolts of High-level pain.</p>
<p>Whilst that’s the fleeting sort, there’s another kind altogether though. Low-level pain is the kind that sticks around and that’s because it’s the type of pain that makes us who we are. It’s why we avoid a neighborhood or why we walk quickly passed a certain coffee shop. Low-level pain is what happens when we see a hairstyle or an outline and we begin to shiver with memories.</p>
<p>Lately I’ve been experiencing an awful amount of High-level pain but I want to hurry it along. I want to push it deep down into a Low-level pain as quickly as possible even if I know that’s naive and foolish. These mushy, useless feelings will take their damn time and there’s nothing I can do to hurry them up.</p>
<p>And I realize now that’s what a breakup really is: the movement of one kind of extraordinary pain into another, from High to Low.</p>
<hr />
<p>The odd thing about this breakup wasn’t the pain however, although that’s certainly more difficult to bear than anything I’ve ever experienced before. The strangest thing has been an absence of light.</p>
<p>My phone has an LED that shines brightly whenever I get a new message and throughout this relationship my phone was always aglow in the brightest, most beautiful of lights. When the two of us were apart I would wake up and find my room glowing in the dark and when I was sat at my office its light would always remind me that she was there, somehow, in the light itself. All the other notifications were pale white and boring LEDS, but her’s were always a radioactive, verdant light.</p>
<p>And so when we broke up I tried to barter with my phone, I begged for the return of the light. I wanted to pull the LED out of its socket, to hurl my phone into the Bay and pretend that I might be able to repair whatever curse I had thrown upon this tiny bulb whilst hopefully curing myself of its unrelenting attraction at the same time.</p>
<p>Anyway, I still miss the person that left me – dearly – but I also miss the flicker of this stupid LED on my phone, too. It’s such a simple thing but I can’t describe how vital its presence was. In its all-seeing omniscience it would calm my nerves, it would guide me along each day and it would soothe me when I was alone in the evenings. It was a reminder that I should be smarter and funnier and more charming than I really am.</p>
<p>So it’s been more than a month after the breakup now and there’s still a part of me that’s waiting for the green light. Several times a day I’ll look at my phone expecting to find that glimmer where a quick swipe would reveal where she is and what she’s doing. It might be a simple joke, or a nervous selfie, or a question, or a song. And somehow that green light means all of those things to me now. I know, I know, that’s pathetic and weird and I should grow up. But that’s why I want to push this High-level pain as deep down as possible.</p>
<p>Because how long will I be waiting for the return of the green light, and for how long will I await the return of my best friend?</p>
Flee2016-12-20T03:12:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/flee/<p>Darkness has trickled in over the hills across the runway and I’m left wondering whether I’m running away from a city once again. This time it’s San Francisco. And this time it’s in December.</p>
<p>I remember only a few months ago returning to SF from a short holiday — hands and legs all curled up around anothers’. I remember the extraordinary sensation of watching San Francisco rear into view beneath us in the dark and for the briefest of moments I was happy because we were home.</p>
<p>But this time there’s no anger in my leaving, and there’s no despair. The city of San Francisco doesn’t frighten me like <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/with-teeth-of-metal-and-glass/">the last time I abandoned America at full speed</a>. Instead, this time it’s far more complicated. There’s a newfound temptation for self harm, for self destruction, for leaving and never coming back. Forget the last six months and forget the next two years of the visa. Abandon, and forget.</p>
<p>The odd thing is that I don’t want to be in San Francisco but alternatively I don’t ever want to leave. Leaving is somehow an admonition of defeat. It feels like I’m sweeping away all the brief and beautiful memories, ignoring everything that happened.</p>
<p>It hurts because I’m leaving a foreign place and yet I’m inbound for another, the home that I grew up in. And now I wonder what it feels like to have a city that you can reliably call home. A place you can see yourself living in for the rest of your life. Consequently, whenever I hear people cheering for their city with pride then an unfamiliar, sharp pang of jealousy tears through me.</p>
<p>For the first time in six months I don’t want to sit still. Traveling hurts but I want to keep moving, and I especially want to keep typing. Because in the typing there’s a form of escape that doesn’t require me to leave.</p>
Blogging and Atrophy2016-11-03T06:12:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/blogging-and-atrophy/<p><a href="https://adactio.com/journal/11436">Jeremy’s post</a> about his first decade with Twitter made for interesting reading, particularly in how he compares the use of that service to the longevity of his website:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m not sure if my Twitter account will still exist ten years from now. But I’m pretty certain that my website will still be around.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Alternatively, it concerns me that folks in the Bay Area tend to treat their websites as business cards instead of archives, as Jeremy suggests. Many designers and developers that I’ve met believe personal websites are constrained to a lonely paragraph of text that only clarifies what they do for a living.</p>
<p>At the moment I think about my website from two angles: as a stream and an archive.</p>
<h2 id="a-stream" tabindex="-1">A Stream <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/blogging-and-atrophy/#a-stream" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>This is how I’ve organised <a href="http://robinrendle.com/notes">/notes</a>—they’re tiny bundles of information that don’t really have to go anywhere or do anything. There’s no pressure to polish the language, it’s a stream of consciousness that can be fine tuned and edited into tip-top shape later on.</p>
<p>Ideally these pieces of text are what I think of as <em>design-agnostic</em>. If I change the typeface or the background or add crazy animations to the page then the text itself won’t mean something different. The text is fluid and isn’t dependent on complicated graphics and other bits of UI to illustrate a point.</p>
<h2 id="an-archive" tabindex="-1">An Archive <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/blogging-and-atrophy/#an-archive" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>This is where I put all of the information that often takes twelve months or so to research, edit, and design — this is how I’ve organised <a href="http://robinrendle.com/essays">/essays</a> for now. These blocks of text are heavily dependent on a specific, custom layout. In order to preserve the longevity of notes I make a brand new stylesheet for each essay, purchase the fonts indefinitely and host them locally, before I throw away the key and never touch the code again. That way, none of that essay code and styles will infect the notes I write.</p>
<p>This point of view requires a different approach to design in general though: How can I ensure that my work is still available, and accessible, for decades into the future, I wonder. How can I protect this little piece of the web, place my stamp on it, and preserve it as best I can?</p>
<p>In early 2013 I decided that I would never delete anything from my site again. Even if it was painfully banal or just plain silly, everything was going to remain in place for as long as possible. Yet slowly, over time, I’m watching these bigger essays that I write break down. Certain features no longer work in browsers as I once remember them; atrophy has set in and it’s like watching the text sink slowly into a thick pool of mud.</p>
<p>And that’s ok. Things are going to change over the decades, considering this website will likely outlast many platforms and social networks and browsers.</p>
<p>Hopefully my website will even outlive me, too. That’s because I don’t want my presence online to resolve into a tacky business card once I’m gone — <em>I’m an XYZ in San Francisco</em> — instead, I want it to be an archive of everything that I’ve ever thought was worth keeping around. All the things I’ve <a href="http://craigmod.com/sputnik/pointable_01/">pointed at</a>, linked to, discussed, argued about. Once I’m gone I want this place to be an archive of all the things I’ve ever loved, even if they were messy and fragile and a little broken.</p>
Gimlet2016-09-05T06:15:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/gimlet/<p>I’ve been a big fan of David Jonathan Ross’ <a href="https://djr.com/gimlet/">Gimlet</a> for the past couple of months and from time to time I find myself picking a character at random and poking at it. Look at that capital Q! Or the & symbol! Gimlet tempts us to sit back and zoom in, with each and every character begging to be used in large sizes.</p>
<p>That’s why I’ve chosen to make a tiny update to my blog and replace the darkly elegant and pseudo-supernatural <a href="https://www.typotheque.com/fonts/nocturno">Nocturno</a> with the somewhat wonky and joyous shapes of Gimlet.</p>
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Strawberries and Cheese2016-06-21T03:46:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/strawberries-and-cheese/<p>The scene opens onto a gloriously dark and grimy café where my father and I have taken refuge from the storm that hovers above; clouds snap and crackle, a gale shudders along the windows whilst trees distort themselves into torturous yoga poses across the street. Inside the café, we’re welcomed with bad coffee and sweaty toast in what must be the guiltiest of Great British pleasures.</p>
<p>My father looks at me, and without a word, asks me why I’m upset. <em>What’s with this peculiar frown</em>? he wonders silently. But this is a complicated frown, I want to reply. It has nothing to do with the food, or the weather. Instead it has everything to do with the ghastly letters of the café, letters that do their best to haunt me; the misshapen logo above the entrance, the misaligned columns of text on the menu, the posters tacked to the wall, the leaflets, the business cards, the hodgepodge of shape and color all around me, everywhere.</p>
<p>It wasn’t long before my father and I begin to reenact the scene from Ratatouille in which the protagonist, the lovable rat chef Remy, is describing his culinary interests to his brother Emile. Remy begs Emile to experiment with food, to combine the cheese and the strawberry before in order to understand what’s available to them, and yet Emile can only dimly sense the difference between cheese, strawberries and any other form of garbage that happens to pass through his digestive system.</p>
<p>The question that consumes every moment of Remy's time is a simple one: how do we learn to taste?</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/remy.gif" alt="remy.gif" /></p>
<p>The same must be said for typography: by training the eye we learn how to see. We become aware of the aesthetic and functional problems of letterforms, problems that are sometimes frivolous but at other times are essential to guide the act of reading. Whenever I hear talk like “we have too many fonts” or whenever I watch someone stare at me when I gawp at bundle of letters, I want to call out: “Strawberries and cheese! Strawberries and cheese!”</p>
<p>Despite those typographic disfigurements in the cafe that bleak afternoon, I wanted to explain how letters can reward the eye with a form of pleasure which is hard to describe. So I want to offer a brief respite from those casual typographic horrors we encounter with a newsletter. It is here, in the Adventures of Typography, where we shall be safe from the wind and the rain, and from all the ugly letters.</p>
<p>It is here that we shall celebrate the strawberries and the cheese of typography.</p>
The Fire in the Smoke2016-05-29T00:26:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-fire-in-the-smoke/<p>My greatest failure as a designer is asking the wrong question at the wrong time. I often jump ahead too quickly and make a string of assumptions because I want to skip to the fun part of designing an interface; fooling around with graphic elements. Everything else in the design process feels like annoying busywork to me, whether that’s the writing, or asking questions, or communicating with my peers.</p>
<p>This is because good design requires patience.</p>
<p>Many young designers hope to clear a path to the finished product as quickly as possible since they cannot bear the disorder that they feel all around them, smothering them with the grime of uncertainty. So they believe that more than half their work is complete when a geometric typeface, a circular avatar and a grid with the proportions of the golden-ratio are set into place.</p>
<p>Alternatively, an experienced designer learns to adore these qualities of unfamiliarity and ignorance. They want to define these <em>feelings</em> into <em>questions</em> and so unfortunately they must spend an awful amount of time with them. They recognise that with each prolonged step they’re nudging the intangible, the numinous, into something that everyone can clearly see.</p>
<p>What’s remarkable is the fortitude required for work of this kind, it’s almost Zen-like.</p>
<p>I imagine myself as a veteran designer at one point or another in the future chanting these sorts of mantras on hilltops and practicing my kōans: “Each act of design is only a cog in a much larger machine,” I whisper to my initiates. “We must welcome the great, everlasting churn of design and edit, design and edit.”</p>
<h2 id="designing-redesigning" tabindex="-1"><s>Designing</s> Redesigning <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-fire-in-the-smoke/#designing-redesigning" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>In the first week of design school my group was asked to tape our work onto the wall. One by one, my friends nonchalantly arranged their work but I felt paralysed in my chair. Having just finished a degree in English Literature I had become familiar with hiding in the reclusive comforts of anonymity because I would only send a private draft of my work to a tutor.</p>
<p>So throughout this nerve-wracking design review it was clear how my friends hadn’t refined their work as much as my pixel-perfect draft, which explored only one manifestation of the problem-solved. I’d been naively tackling a single problem in isolation, whilst my friends were still wondering if they were looking at the right questions altogether.</p>
<p>Through these drafts and rough edits my friends uncovered a torrent of problems that I had clearly stumbled over without noticing. And I think I latched onto this one solution to the problem because I was terrified of failure. On the other hand, my peers saw these rough edits on the wall as an experimentation with, and joyful celebration of, mistake-making. The initial clumsiness of their work could be easily revised later whilst my pixel-perfect mockups couldn’t be so easily tidied away and I had to start the whole process over again in earnest.</p>
<p>My mistake was in believing that the editing process was a form of weakness, of failure, or in short; a screw up. If I had to edit my work in anyway then I subsequently believed I had failed to see the problem in the first place. Each amendment became a physical marker of my wasted efforts, so that the very thought of editing my work was horrid to me.</p>
<p>It took many years for me to recognise that this editing process is where the differences between the naïve and the experienced can be found, but it’s also where the many tangents between design and writing collide, too.</p>
<h2 id="writing-rewriting" tabindex="-1"><s>Writing</s> Rewriting <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-fire-in-the-smoke/#writing-rewriting" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>In the classic book <em>On Writing Well</em>, William Zinsser describes the design process as coherently as any designer:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I don’t like to write; I like to have written. But I love to rewrite. I especially like to cut: to press the DELETE key and see an unnecessary word or phrase vanish into the electricity. I like to replace a humdrum word with one that has more precision or color. [...] With every small refinement I feel that I’m coming nearer to where I would like to arrive, and when I finally get there I know it was the rewriting, not the writing, that won the game.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So when we talk about writing what we’re really talking about is rewriting since no-one can write well on their first attempt, it’s an impossible task. But, with enough patience, we can cast an eye over the words we’ve already written to nudge, push and cajole them into something far beyond the pulp of our everyday thoughts. Once that initial piece of writing is underway we can then begin the enjoyable, fruitful work: the rewriting.</p>
<p>If we turn our heads and squint at <a href="http://wm4.wilsonminer.com/posts/2008/apr/12/optimizer/">an old post</a> by Wilson Miner we begin to see his frustration with this now familiar process, too:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>That’s one reason I feel like I’m best at redesigns—taking something that works and making it better. [...] I use websites and play games and think about the redesign.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is why the best advice that writers tend to give is this: regardless of the quality of the work, and regardless of how incompetent it makes you feel, just keep writing. Abandon all hope of sounding smart or brilliant. With a private collection of notes it doesn’t matter what you write, just so long as you write it. It’s impossible to count the number of times I’ve returned to a note and decided that there was something worth keeping. Hidden deep amongst embarrassing clichés and turns of phrase there was often a flicker of an idea that could be developed.</p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIhLvue17Sd7F6pU2ByRRb0igiI-WKk3D">the documentary series for <em>Broken Age</em></a>, Tim Schafer talks about the name of his previous adventure game, <em>Grim Fandango</em>. The camera pans through his notes, where he made hundreds of attempts to name the game, and many of them are quite embarrassing. Yet! You can see the words slowly gain momentum, like a wheel finding traction in the dirt, and everything comes together to arrive at the perfect name.</p>
<p>In the design process that I’ve now started to adopt I’m finding that being messy and uncoordinated at the beginning of designing a layout will yield the best results. For instance, <a href="http://robinrendle.com/essays/new-web-typography"><em>The New Web Typography</em></a> was complimented for its design and layout, but what many didn’t see were the dozens of failed attempts I made to figure out the visual language for the essay.</p>
<p>Those early, haphazard ideas looked entirely random, not to mention ugly, but over time I started to make decisions about what didn’t work. This effectively helped me jump to the redesign phase as quickly as possible because I could question all the assumptions that I’ve previously made, without attaching myself emotionally to any one pixel-perfect solution.</p>
<p>So I suppose the real question I’m asking myself here is this: why do I struggle to see my own work with the same sense of judgement? Why is the writing/designing so difficult when the rewriting/redesigning feels so much easier?</p>
<p>I think it’s because I’m still trapped in the mindset of the inexperienced designer. I rush towards color and typefaces and the latest CSS trick in the belief that this is what design means. And the more real, working progress I can show on day one of my involvement in a project, then the more capable I am at this-thing-called-design.</p>
<p>Aza Raskin eloquently phrased the point: design is not about learning to think outside the box, it’s about finding the right box to think inside of. Despite this sounding like a TED-esque revelation I think it makes for an important analogy, and so I’m trying my damnedest to see the early stages of design as a messy workshop full of these boxes that I can think inside of. I’m trying my best to ignore these errors of fidelity and look more carefully at the questions that I need to ask myself instead.</p>
<p>It’s clear to me now that great design or writing has in fact nothing to do with talent. Instead, it has everything to do with bombarding our experiments with a delirious amount of patience, whittling down each mad idea into something uniform, something coherent and visible.</p>
<p>Or, as Arthur Plotnik once wrote so eloquently in <em>The Elements of Editing:</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p>“We edit to let the fire show through the smoke.”</p>
</blockquote>
One Thousand Days in America2016-05-13T18:35:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/a-thousand-days-in-america/<p>I’m moving to San Francisco. After months of waiting, hoping, with fingers-crossed, the stars in the constellation of American bureaucracy aligned themselves this morning as I stood in the queue at the <span class="caps">U.S.</span> Embassy in London. But there was no certificate or handshake once my visa was approved, there were no balloons, and there was certainly not any triumphant, patriotic music to celebrate the affair.</p>
<p>However, the peculiarities of the visa process has done little to stifle my excitement, as for the next three years I'll be exploring the West coast from my new home. It’s here that I’ll be working with the excellent design team at <a href="https://gusto.com/">Gusto</a>, and I simply can’t wait to get started.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/bridge-889654.jpg" alt="bridge-889654.jpg" /></p>
<p>In late 2015 I applied to the Designer Fund’s <a href="http://designerfund.com/bridge/">Bridge program</a>. This rather helpfully connects designers with startups, and it was their team that got me in contact with Gusto. Unfortunately, I missed all the <a href="http://designerfund.com/bridge/program/">workshops and activities</a> thanks to the prolonged visa process, but if you happen to be thinking about applying to the Bridge program this year then I can only recommend it—the team has been wonderfully helpful and kind.</p>
<p>During my first thousand days in San Francisco I want to sneak into the blossoming <a href="https://www.instagram.com/letterformarchive/">typography community</a> and beef up my design and programming skills. I’ll continue to share what I’m learning about on <a href="http://css-tricks.com/">my blog</a> and I’ll be selling <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BEepFDlDUqv/?taken-by=robinrendle">my motorcycle</a> for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dw1dYR36Gwg">something else</a> so that I can explore <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsCfufAp2tM">California</a> and the Pacific Northwest in style, be it <a href="https://thebolditalic.com/lights-out-the-best-places-to-stargaze-in-san-francisco-the-bold-italic-san-francisco-8aab5df53dcd#.2ggi113ou">star gazing</a> or riding around the <a href="https://story.californiasunday.com/california-incline">California Incline</a>.</p>
Nothing is where you think it is2016-05-02T23:26:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/nothing-is-where-you-think-it-is/<p>I often forget which landmass I should attribute my birth right to.</p>
<p>I mean, what are the differences between the English and the Scots again? Are the Welsh English? How can one half of Ireland not be in the same country? Should I call myself English, or Great British, or a citizen of the United Kingdom?</p>
<p>It’s impossible for me to look at a map of the UK and to see a civilised nation state. Instead, I find a formation of rocks inhabited by tribes that are unwilling to work together, who would rather fight in order to protect their national sovereignty. (The xenophobia that’s shown its ugly face, thanks to the upcoming referendum as to whether the UK should remain in the EU, only confirms my natural distaste for those that need to weave their identity into their post code.)</p>
<p>Subsequently, whenever I see the borders that separate towns from cities, counties from countries, I find it difficult not to think of the lives lost to push that border a centimetre to the left, a nail’s width to the right; when I see the outlines of a country alongside another I see the graveyards populated by the dead that gave them shape.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/1-DsvhtHk5BCumWCynveDPiQ.jpeg" alt="1-DsvhtHk5BCumWCynveDPiQ.jpeg" /></p>
<p>English maps, in fact all maps for that matter, don’t reflect geographical or geological features as much as they reflect the petty human arrangements that are conducted in our name. The lines that separate us are less likely to be placed there because of a river or a mountain than they are because of some dirty contract signed long ago by murderers, vying for political advantage over one another.</p>
<p>The goal of every map then is not to accurately represent the Earth, but to represent the way we think. Our maps, our names of places, are just the record keepers of murderous thoughts, as we see the differences between two kinds of people and require that a line be drawn between them.</p>
What would happen if we just gave people money?2016-04-26T13:52:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/what-would-happen-if-we-just-gave-people-money/<p>This is <a href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/universal-basic-income/">a sharp and brilliant piece</a> by Andrew Flowers. He looks at the current research behind universal basic income, where the government would effectively cut social benefits and replace them with a single wage for both rich and poor alike.</p>
<p>He writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>From Switzerland to the Netherlands to Kenya to Silicon Valley, a mixture of insecurity and curiosity are driving interest in basic income, but its dominant ideology — and appeal — is utopian. The core existential struggle lurking in the debates over basic income centers on what meaning work holds in our lives. Straub, the Swiss referendum organizer, remembers his great-grandfather working 10 hours per day, six days per week. That kind of toil is no longer necessary, nor desirable. The dream of a world where we produce more than we need has come true.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Certainly not all social programs should be cut, but this discussion is absolutely fascinating nonetheless.</p>
I, Website2016-04-15T18:49:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/i-website/<p>Chris messed around with a famous essay by Leonard E. Read called <a href="https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I,_Pencil">I, Pencil</a> and I love it so much:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>How are these words delivered to you? Massive networks of wires! Fiber-optic undersea cables line all the oceans and seas and grip the Earth like a hairnet. A single cable crossing an ocean costs hundreds of millions of dollars to install. Imagine the slowly plodding boats, embedding these cables into the seabeds. Who captains these vessels? Who turns the crank releasing more cable to the depths. Who prepares the pork and beans? Who scrapes the barnacles from the boats hull? These legions are among my antecedents. [...] Bask in a traceroute, a pale visualization of a journey through our vast network.</p>
</blockquote>
Now Available for Freelance Work2016-04-13T12:59:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/available-for-freelance-work/<p>After a rather unfortunate set of circumstances, which I’ll make sure to write about soon, I’m now available for contract web design and front-end development work.</p>
<p>From now until late May 2016 I want to work on as many projects as possible. So I’ve set up a <a href="http://robinrendle.com/work">portfolio</a> and <a href="http://robinrendle.com/work/about">written</a> a little bit about how I can contribute to both the design and development of a web project.</p>
Learning in public2016-03-22T20:26:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/learning-in-public/<p>You might be familiar with the <a href="http://www.gamereplays.org/community/What_kind_of_shroud_fog_of_war_do_you_preferl-t948562.html">fog of war</a>. This is how designers obscure sections of the video game world until one of the characters has stepped through it. The idea is to build a sense of tension and adventure; the fog supplies the world with mystery. At the beginning of the player’s quest they have no idea about their enemy or their technological capabilities or even their population. They’re blinded and so they must strive to understand their world and the place that they hold within it.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/LingoAsset.jpg" alt="LingoAsset.jpg" /></p>
<p>I’ve started to see the act of learning in a similar way. We start off knowing a lot about a little and gradually, as we shake ourselves through the world we begin to make all these connections; we find resources, we find other people and most importantly we learn about how little we knew when we started.</p>
<p>By learning in public, however, we can more confidently shape that fog around us, making us feel comfortable when trying to learn about something scary and new. When we publicly declare that “this is what I’ve figured out so far…” we then give people an opportunity to nudge us in the right direction and offer a supporting hand. Regardless of the format, and despite the unnerving sense of vulnerability we might have to fight on a constant basis, I’ve found that the potential opportunities far outweigh the embarrassment of messing things up.</p>
<p>Or we can choose to face that intimidating fog alone.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/fog-of-war.jpg" alt="fog-of-war.jpg" /></p>
<p>Whenever I’m not collaborating with friends on a project I tend to daydream of those episodes in Mad Men where Don or Peggy would stumble upon a typewriter. The magic of this device would give them the courage to stand up to the easily available drink and sex on display, they’d instead push back against the world a little bit in order to get work done. But after a short amount of time the loneliness of this work never fails to drive them back to their vice of choice.</p>
<p>Consequently, on the topic of typewriters and this idea of learning in isolation, I’m reminded of the novel <em>Close to the Machine</em> where Ellen Ullman describes herself in relation to her father:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I used to have an idea of myself seated at a desk. I would see myself from the back, my head bent over some work, wholly absorbed in whatever I was doing. That absorption, a certain absence from one set of things and extreme presence to another, became an emblem for me, some ideal way of being, a self toward which I worked for most of my life.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ultimately, Ellen discovers how the loneliness is toxic both for herself and her late father. But I think that this form of isolation, of being alone at the desk, is rather frightening because the fog will always be there. It will always exceed our grasp, it will always be revealing to us new forms and shapes to our ignorance. How can we be expected to cope by ourselves?</p>
<p>So whenever I see a half-written note that someone’s posted to their blog, or a video that they’ve recorded under the dim glow of their bedroom lamp, whenever someone is talking about a subject that they barely understand and they’re pushing towards the unknowable universe I feel that fog around me and I tend to see through it, its force on me weakens.</p>
<p>For instance, when Chris and Sarah <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR_Fb2LbnhY">talk about React</a>. Or when Darius messes around with his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geQnq5whBVM&feature=youtu.be">SP 404</a>. Or <a href="http://nicewebtype.com/notes/">Tim’s growing design corpus</a>. Or Robin and Craig’s <a href="https://medium.com/message/the-pickle-a-conversation-about-making-digital-books-8242360378e4#.9veqk9c67">fascinating back and forth</a> about The Pickle. Or <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/CUNNING-PLANS-Talks-Warren-Ellis-ebook/dp/B00Z9LFC8U/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1458680063&sr=1-1&keywords=cunning+plans">the collection of talks</a> by Warren Ellis. Or <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Madness-Rack-Honey-Collected-Lectures/dp/1933517573">a book about poetry</a>. Or <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0l7LzC_h8I">a documentary</a> about a videogame. Or <a href="http://tilde.club/~ford/">an olde blog</a>. Or <a href="http://chloeweil.com/blog/uptight">Chloe’s note</a> about Chrome extensions. Or the recording of <a href="https://soundcloud.com/cassiemarketos/subway">music on the subway</a>.</p>
<p>With company like this the fog is no longer a menace to our confidence, it becomes a map of the territory left unexplored, an intellectual landscape waiting for harvest. With each step, no matter how small, we are contributing to the vast record by which our ignorance of the world recedes.</p>
<p>But also, most importantly, we then encourage unlikely strangers whom we’ve never met to pursue their own adventures into the fog, with their own combination of friends in tow.</p>
In Defense of Webfonts2016-03-18T17:26:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/in-defense-of-webfonts/<p>Yesterday Adam Morse wrote about <a href="http://mrmrs.io/writing/2016/03/17/webfonts/">webfonts</a>, which, well...the gist is that webfonts are bad for usability and performance so we should effectively ditch them:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’ve heard a lot of arguments about why to use webfonts. In none of those arguments, have I heard about a single problem users have that is solved by using webfonts. And well, I’m only really interested in solving problems for users.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I think his arguments can be summarised into two main points which I’d like to tackle, one by one:</p>
<ol>
<li>Web fonts aren’t predictable.</li>
<li>Web fonts are very expensive in time, money and resource size.</li>
</ol>
<h2 id="problem-1:-web-fonts-are-unpredictable" tabindex="-1">Problem #1: Web fonts are unpredictable <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/in-defense-of-webfonts/#problem-1:-web-fonts-are-unpredictable" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Adam continues his argument:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Typography is not about aesthetics, it’s about serving the text. If even a small percentage of people don't consume your content due to a use of webfonts, your typography is failing.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I want to move away from any argument about semantics so I won’t address what typography is or isn’t (many have done <a href="http://practicaltypography.com/what-is-typography.html">an admirable job on that front</a>). As to Adam’s second point: I agree! But if a web font fails to load for whatever reason then that’s a relatively simple problem to solve and it has nothing to do with the font file itself.</p>
<p>We can smooth out the rough edges of a font request by using <a href="https://css-tricks.com/loading-web-fonts-with-the-web-font-loader/">the proper technique</a>; a poorly designed front-end architecture is hardly a reason to suggest we abandon web fonts altogether.</p>
<p>There’s another suggestion here in Adam’s argument which I might be reading a little too much into, but it appears that he argues we should use a “web-safe” or a system font because they’re more predictable. However, I would argue that there’s no such thing as a “web-safe” font. Take a look at the support for <a href="http://fontfamily.io/helvetica">Helvetica</a>, <a href="http://fontfamily.io/georgia">Georgia</a>, <a href="http://fontfamily.io/times">Times</a> or heck, even the <a href="http://fontfamily.io/sans-serif">sans-serif</a> keyword. If predictability is what we’re looking for then I’m afraid we’ve picked the wrong network to design things on top of.</p>
<h2 id="problem-2:-web-fonts-are-expensive" tabindex="-1">Problem #2: Web fonts are expensive <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/in-defense-of-webfonts/#problem-2:-web-fonts-are-expensive" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>This is where Adam states that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Webfonts come with a number of costs. They cost money to license. They cost time to implement.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sure, but how much time do we spend on other aspects of a design? On the quality of the photography, on the editing of text? On the unnecessarily large custom frameworks we build and ship? How often have we re-written code that could be copy and pasted from Bootstrap? Good design takes a certain amount of time and great design is about figuring out the best way to spend our limited resources.</p>
<p>If licensing a web font is a problem, then there are plenty of <a href="https://www.google.com/fonts">free web fonts</a> out there, although personally I would avoid using them because they’re likely to not be as intricate as a licensed font.</p>
<p>Continuing with Adam’s post, he writes that <em>“fonts cost time to download, and with some mobile data plans they can cost money to download as well.”</em> But if we find that a web font takes too much time to download then we can set a reasonable timeout on the web font loader we’re using. Or we can subset the font by a specific language, or remove certain OpenType features. Or perhaps we can even redesign the piece of text to require less fonts altogether (although this is probably not a great solution). Or maybe we can compromise even more on the design and remove a single image, which ought to make up for the request of a font.</p>
<h2 id="the-value-of-a-webfont" tabindex="-1">The Value of a Webfont <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/in-defense-of-webfonts/#the-value-of-a-webfont" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>All of these points lead to Adam’s vitriolic condemnation of web fonts as being lazy, useless things; they’re not worth the effort to implement or stress over because they have no value whatsoever. On this point I heartily disagree.</p>
<p>Although Adam does make some good points towards the end:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>System fonts can be beautiful.<br />
Webfonts are not a requirement for great typography.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I entirely agree with this sentiment and, in certain circumstances, system or “web-safe” fonts should be used instead. When we download a typeface that is almost identical to Georgia or Helvetica then there’s not much of an advantage that can be had from requesting a large font file.</p>
<p>With that said, I don’t believe that all of human experience can be elegantly communicated via Helvetica, Times, Georgia, or San Francisco. And when I read that “typography is not about aesthetics” then I sigh deeply, heavily and come to the conclusion that 1. yes it is and 2. aesthetics <em>is</em> a problem for the reader. The more ugliness that is pressed upon us, the more lazy we become. Beauty, legibility, subtlety, these are the qualities that are possible with the help of web fonts and without them we are left with a dismal landscape devoid of visual grace or wit.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://robinrendle.com/essays/new-web-typography/">text is more important than the font</a>, but an unusual letter form adds a value which is difficult to quantify with words alone. If we’re requesting something like Proxima Nova then sure, I feel that the designer has made an error of sorts because that typeface has been used so frequently as to be bland, it registers not a single emotion from the reader. But what about other letters? Are we truly naive enough to believe that everything can be said with such unnecessary restrictions to our typographic palette? What are letterforms truly capable of?</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/oldsmobile.png" alt="Image of text set in SignPainter by House Industries" /></p>
<p>What is the value of one shape over another? How can they draw us into the information? How can they help shine a light on the differences between an old car model built for a certain age and a modern film that finds its inspiration in the offbeat kilter of jazz?</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/birdman.svg" alt="Image of text set in JeanLuc" /></p>
<p>A web font, just like any other visual stimulus, has work to accomplish. It does have a value and a position in the designer’s toolkit because a web font is one of the most effective ways to display the intent of the text.</p>
<p>Perhaps we need to spend more time thinking about font files as web designers and we need to think about their goals, about their shortcomings.</p>
<p>And then we need to go to work and fix them.</p>
The Outpost2016-02-22T11:22:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-outpost/<p>In all the excitement of recent months I forgot to mention that a couple of weeks ago we finished work on an update to <a href="http://outpostpdx.com/">The Outpost</a> website. Blend modes! Viewport units! object-fit magic! This teaser combines a lot of the techniques that <a href="https://css-tricks.com/author/robinrendle/">I’ve been learning about</a> into one exciting project.</p>
<p>But, after seeing the <a href="https://twitter.com/outpostpdx">constant stream</a> of good news emanating from the space and the <a href="https://medium.com/@waxpancake/the-outpost-is-here-9d247013a304#.cerbsssux">current line-up of members and patrons</a> that have joined up, I can’t help but feel extraordinarily jealous. The two Andys are going to make that space really special in the weeks and months to come.</p>
object-fit and object-position2016-02-21T20:57:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/object-fit-and-object-position/<p>I wrote up <a href="https://css-tricks.com/on-object-fit-and-object-position/">a quick overview</a> of two of my favourite CSS properties lately. I’ve found that in general day-to-day interface design that I keep returning to these new methods to manipulate inline images and so I thought someone else might find these tricks useful, too.</p>
On File Formats, Very Briefly2016-01-18T23:58:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/on-file-formats-briefly/<p>Paul Ford describes <a href="https://themanual.org/read/issues/4/paul-ford/article">the early days</a> of the web:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Then along came HTML, and what I remember most was that sense of being back inside the file. Sure, HTML was a typographic nightmare, a bunch of unjustified Times New Roman in 12 pt on screens with chiclet-sized pixels, but under the hood you could see all the pieces. Just like WordPerfect. That transparency was a wonderful thing, and it renewed computing for me. I was in my early twenties but there was such ennui—NeXT wasn’t catching on, Apple was crashing, and Microsoft was all paperclips. On the web, if something didn’t work, you could hop right in and tidy it up, and hit reload. And hit reload. And hit reload. I imagine I have hit reload five or six million times in my life. If you were to identify the single characteristic of a web person, it would be that their thumb and index finger have certain calluses where they press the command/control and “R” keys. Just thinking of reloading, my fingers instinctually go into a sort of crab-claw formation. I’m always ready to refresh.</p>
</blockquote>
Cushion2016-01-03T00:21:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/cushion/<p>For the past year I’ve been trying to get my freelance business off the ground and thanks to <a href="http://cushionapp.com/">Cushion</a> it’s been an awful lot less stressful and terrifying than it might have been otherwise.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/cushion.png" alt="Cushion" /></p>
<p>Cushion is an app for organising a freelancer’s schedule and income. Currently it’s being designed and developed by <a href="http://destroytoday.com/">Jonnie Hallman</a> who’s been writing about <a href="http://cushionapp.com/journal">his design process</a>, his company’s <a href="http://cushionapp.com/expenses">expenses</a> and all sorts of <a href="http://cushionapp.com/blog">other musings</a>. Naturally, all of this working in public has been terribly inspiring—as I’ve been using the app on a daily basis and as I read about each new feature or problem I’ve come to appreciate just how difficult it is to make a service like Cushion work behind the scenes.</p>
<p>How has this service helped my business though? Well, I tend towards messiness and disorganisation by nature yet somehow it’s encouraged me to fight all this unruly behaviour. Whenever I load it up in the morning I can get a quick glance at how much is owed to me, what projects I’ve got coming up next and what things I currently have to work on. I’ve been using it in conjunction with <a href="https://www.getharvest.com/">Harvest</a>, which records my time, and <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/cushion/trello.com">Trello</a>, which records all the tiny details of the job (such as “fix this broken image” or “style this component”) and so far I’m very happy with the results.</p>
<p>Looking back on the past twelve months I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some wonderfully smart folks such as <a href="http://www.simplygoodwork.com/">Good Work</a>, <a href="http://madebykind.com/">Kind</a>, <a href="http://xoxopdx.com/">XOXO</a>, and <a href="https://css-tricks.com/">CSS-Tricks</a>, and even though I’ve worked on projects I would never have dreamed of just a few short months ago, Cushion has been there to help make sense of it all. It’s been sitting in the background quietly doing a single job and doing it well. It’s pushed me to clean up my act, to tidy invoices and other financial ephemera. It’s eased the innate awkwardness of client work and helped make it all just a little less awkward.</p>
<p>I don’t have much of an idea as to what 2016 has in store for me yet, but I’m sure that Cushion will be probably be along for the ride, too.</p>
<p><small>Hey, if you sign up with <a href="http://get.cushionapp.com/bd21cc21ad">this referral link</a> then I get a tiny kickback.</small></p>
Putting thought into things2015-12-01T10:45:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/putting-thought-into-things/<p>From the archives of iA, <a href="https://ia.net/know-how/putting-thought-into-things"><em>Putting Thought Into Things</em></a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Listening is a masochist endeavor. To do it right you have to put everything down. Not just your phone, even pen and paper. There is nothing to hold on to when you just listen. You have to use your full attention, registering everything that you see and hear. You have to slow down your self-perception and focus on the outside, on what you do not understand. Compared to how we usually operate, listening means focusing on pain, diving into boredom. In order to see the other in slow motion, you need to stop the camera of self-perception that makes you the star, and speed up the camera that records the outside.</p>
<p>Listening requires the patience to recognize your feelings in other people’s words, no matter how trivial, dark and empty their language may seem. It requires you to become someone else while you listen. The fog of boredom and emptiness when listening to people you don’t sympathize with can be a sign that they are boring, empty, or not making sense. It can also be a sign that you do not understand. Listening requires that you accept the nuisance of not understanding, of feeling deaf, blind, numb, and still pay attention. Listening is the first step of deep thought. It is painful to give yourself up, but it is highly rewarding. To fill the glass with fresh water, first empty it.</p>
</blockquote>
Longform2015-11-29T13:39:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/longform/<p>I’ve been listening to the interviews on <a href="http://longform.org/">Longform</a> over the past week—in between cleaning, working, heading to the gym—and they’ve been so consistently insightful. Here are my favourites so far:</p>
<ul>
<li>George Saunders on <a href="http://longform.org/posts/longform-podcast-75-george-saunders">‘the long corridor’</a> and recognising how difficult and time consuming it is to make something great.</li>
<li>Ta-Nehisi Coates on his book <a href="http://longform.org/posts/longform-podcast-168-ta-nehisi-coates"><em>Between the World and Me</em></a> which I’ve just ordered and cannot wait to dig into. I also checked out an older episode where Ta-Nehisi talks about how <a href="http://longform.org/posts/longform-podcast-97-ta-nehisi-coates">“writers can’t assume that their work is going to cause change”</a>.</li>
<li>Rukmini Callimachi on <a href="http://longform.org/posts/previously-on-the-longform-podcast-129-rukmini-callimachi">covering ISIS for the NYT</a>.</li>
</ul>
A New Responsive Font Format for the Web2015-11-26T22:08:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/a-new-responsive-font-format-for-the-web/<p><a href="https://css-tricks.com/a-new-responsive-font-format-for-the-web/">Here’s an article</a> I wrote for CSS-Tricks where I discuss all the benefits and troublesome problems of the new font format that <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/ampersand-2015">Nick Sherman mentioned at Ampersand</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I think there’s huge potential for a new variable font format to become a key part of the designer’s tool belt. It would greatly improve the reading experience of general users of the web, too. But that doesn’t mean we can ignore the many problems and hurdles that we have to overcome to get a draft spec agreed upon.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Make sure to check <a href="http://typedrawers.com/discussion/comment/16227/#Comment_16227">this thread on Typedrawers</a> about the current work being done to implement a working solution.</p>
Ed Snowden Taught Me To Smuggle Secrets Past Incredible Danger. Now I Teach You.2015-11-23T13:15:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/ed-snowden-taught-me-to-smuggle-secrets-past-incredible-danger-now-i-teach-you/<p><a href="https://theintercept.com/2014/10/28/smuggling-snowden-secrets/">Micah Lee on his work</a> regarding the Snowden revelations:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Working in Tails to remain anonymous while I developed the site, however, meant that this would be trickier than the web development I’d done in the past. I didn’t have access to the latest browsers I was used to, and I didn’t dare test the mobile version of the site on my smartphone. I also had concern that my coding style might betray my identity: my code for this project used similar commenting and naming conversions as other code I’d written in the past. Trying to develop software without your personal coding style is like trying to write an essay using someone else’s voice. I was also concerned that the visual designs I was creating could be compared to my work in the past.</p>
</blockquote>
Loading fonts with the Web Font Loader2015-11-17T13:17:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/loading-fonts-with-the-web-font-loader/<p><a href="https://css-tricks.com/loading-web-fonts-with-the-web-font-loader/">Over on CSS-Tricks</a> I've written an intro to font loading and discussed the problems with the Flash of Unstyled Text approach that many designers today still prefer:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Several years ago the consensus on font loading in the community was that, as a website loads, all fonts should be hidden until the correct resources have been downloaded. Many designers and developers argued that the default font loading method called the “Flash of Unstyled Text”, or FOUT, was an annoyance to users. This is when the fallback web font, say Georgia, is shown on screen first then replaced by a custom font when it loaded. They argued that it would make for a more cohesive browsing experience if users simply waited for everything to download instead of experiencing this flash from one typeface to another.</p>
</blockquote>
Ampersand 20152015-11-14T18:11:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/ampersand-2015/<p>This year’s <a href="http://2015.ampersandconf.com/">Ampersand</a> was a perfect cavalcade of typographic misadventures which has left me buzzing with ideas. First up was <a href="http://kupferschrift.de/">Indra Kupferschmid</a>’s fascinating talk about web typography and I jotted down a couple of useful points she made that I often tend to ignore when designing an interface:</p>
<ul>
<li>We shouldn’t justify text if we can’t control hyphenation and on the web we currently have very little control (unless we use a lot of hacks).</li>
<li>We should remember that whitish text on a dark background probably requires a typeface of a lighter weight.</li>
<li>Think about the motivations of the reader: are they really dedicated to the information on your website, or do they need a little visual nudge to help them understand what you want them to know?</li>
<li>How much work do we want the reader to do? Should they have to scroll so much to find the information they’re looking for?</li>
</ul>
<p>Indra’s discussion about the design of the <a href="http://bentonmodern.webtype.com/">Benton Modern website</a> was particularly insightful, too.</p>
<p class="full">
<img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/ampersand.jpg" class="full" />
</p>
<p>Next, <a href="https://medium.com/@mwichary">Marcin Wichary</a> gave a talk about his typographic monomania at Medium. It was interesting to learn about the sheer number of hacks that are required to <a href="https://medium.com/designing-medium/crafting-link-underlines-on-medium-7c03a9274f9">get proper underlines for links</a>, <a href="https://medium.com/@mwichary/fixing-a-chrome-dictionary-issue-bbd7c5314f01">or the Chrome dictionary bug that almost drove him insane</a>. I’ve been following his work for the last year or so and each time I’m always astonished by his perseverance (also this was one of the most technically and visually impressive talks I’ve ever seen).</p>
<p>After the first break <a href="https://twitter.com/jensimmons">Jen Simmons</a> talked about how design on the web is pretty mundane and boring by print standards. This led to her examining the latest additions to the CSS spec which might help us make bigger, brighter things.</p>
<p>Jen mentioned how <em>the medium shapes the medium</em> and how designers see the work of others and continue to imitate their layout solutions. Lately I’ve only really seen the web as a delivery mechanism for text documents and I realise that this limits what I can make and how I contribute to the community. At XOXO, I remember talking to a developer and he mentioned that he was working on building a comic book series in the browser and he talked about how he had to deal with all these strange bugs and layout problems that I had no idea even existed, mostly because I’ve only built websites with boxes of text.</p>
<p>As a presiding member of the NSSFC (the <a href="https://twitter.com/NickSherman">Nick Sherman</a> Super Fanboy Club) I found that Nick’s talk was just as interesting as I hoped it would be. He began talking about how web fonts in 2015 are mostly static and he complained that they can’t change weight or width depending on their environment; the glyphs inside are more like pictures than the responsive micro-systems we really need for setting complex text on the web. This led to a discussion about multiple masters.</p>
<p>In type design there’s a practice called interpolation where you have two designs, say a light weight and a black weight, and then you can use a tool to generate a design between these two extremes. In this case you might want to generate a regular weight and so using this tool would save a lot of time designing everything by hand. Although, in practice these algorithmically generated fonts require a lot of fine tuning.</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/interpolate.gif" />
</figure>
<p>We can interpolate an almost infinite combination of weights and widths that we need. But what if we take this practice of type design and move it over to the web? What might this mean for developers and designers? Well, it would be helpful because we’d only be making a request for a single font, instead of the multiple fonts we need today for book, medium and bold weights or thin, compressed and wide fonts. Secondly, we’d have a lot more control; sometimes tiny adjustments to an interface, like beefing up the font-weight of some text when it’s placed on a light background, can have a big impact on usability.</p>
<p>Here’s how this might work in CSS:</p>
<p data-height="450" data-theme-id="20935" data-slug-hash="aea26c94e5d8a9ea003c748ae324dc86" data-default-tab="css" data-user="robinrendle" class="codepen">See the Pen <a href="http://codepen.io/robinrendle/pen/aea26c94e5d8a9ea003c748ae324dc86/">aea26c94e5d8a9ea003c748ae324dc86</a> by Robin Rendle (<a href="http://codepen.io/robinrendle">@robinrendle</a>) on <a href="http://codepen.io/">CodePen</a>.</p>
<script async="" src="https://assets.codepen.io/assets/embed/ei.js"></script>
<p>Wouldn’t this be really helpful? I can think of a dozen situations where this might improve the interfaces I’ve been working on.</p>
<p>This isn’t the code Nick used in his example, but I think it’s close enough to get an idea of his suggestions. After the talk I talked to the type designer <a href="https://www.daltonmaag.com/">Bruno Maag</a> and he seemed a little hesitant to agree that this would be a good idea in practice for type designers—but I think that Nick’s experiment suggests that the idea of a new variable font format is certainly worth exploring in the short term.</p>
<p>Next was Bruno Maag’s talk about <a href="http://www.amazon.com/b?node=11624010011">Bookerly</a>, the new type family for the Kindle platform. He talked about the constraints that helped shape the design process, how to deal with certain resolutions and e-ink screen formats. Bruno reminded me that type design has to be a business before it can be an art form; the introduction of many features like small caps, multiple weights and widths, all of these features take time and, well, time is money.</p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/lugotype">Lu Yu’s</a> talk made this idea of typography-as-a-business really sink in. As she mentioned, Chinese fonts can have up to 10,000 different glyphs which means that it’s very difficult to produce a quality type system, but it also means that a single Chinese webfont can be as large as 10mb in size (!). These kinds of problems led to Typekit’s <a href="http://blog.typekit.com/2015/06/15/announcing-east-asian-web-font-support/">subsetting features</a>.</p>
<p>It’s also surprising to learn that Chinese dialects, of which there are many, don't have italic variations. Also also, considering there are so many different Chinese dialects—where people can't communicate across different parts of the country— I wondered whether it even make sense to call them by the same name? That term blurs all the complex traditions and distinct typographic variations between these groups. Saying <em>Asian scripts</em> is annoying for the same reason. Does Burmese sound/look/work like Japanese or Thai? These umbrella terms mask the complexity that designers need to confront.</p>
<p>Next, <a href="http://mymymy.co.uk/book-covers/">Matthew Young</a> made a deep dive into his work at Penguin and the design of <a href="https://www.pelicanbooks.com/">Pelican Books</a>. This project seems to be a test bed for <a href="http://craigmod.com/">Craig Mod’s</a> ideas; they made the web version of Pelican just as important as the series of physical books and oh boy does it show. Matthew’s work might be the very manifestation of what my friend <a href="https://twitter.com/paulozoom?lang=en">Paulo</a> fondly describes as a “website that look like a website.”</p>
<p>After the final break of the day <a href="http://www.sarahhyndman.com/">Sarah Hyndman’s</a> talk was about her playful tests in typography. She questioned how people <em>feel</em> about certain categories of typefaces and why that might be. She also made predictions about how the audience would feel about a particular font and that was kind of spooky. Although, at the end of the talk I was left wondering whether these typographic dating games and brand-association puzzles that Sarah talked about would ever prove to have a useful scientific impact on the practice of typesetting and type design.</p>
<p>Finally, <a href="http://www.maratz.com/">Marko Dugonjić’s</a> talk about the design of the <a href="http://bentonmodern.webtype.com/">Benton Modern website</a> closed the day of talks. He appeared to support a lot of what Jen Simmons mentioned and walked through the little bits of CSS that really makes the website shine. Also, he dived into the tools he’s made, such as <a href="http://typetester.org/">Type Tester</a>, which could become a useful part of the web designer’s tool belt as it sits in the helpful middle-ground between code and GUI.</p>
A pointable we2015-11-10T23:28:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/a-pointable-we/<p>I keep returning to Craig Mod’s fervent, potent ideas on what it means to be a part of the web, both as a citizen and as a large publisher:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All I know is the more I read digitally, the more this feeling — the strange joy of adding to the corpus and seeing where it takes us — grows inside me, and I can't be the only one to feel this. Adding to the corpus — making things pointable — has become habitual, and aspects of it are becoming more and more passive. These habits and expectations aren't going anywhere.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I think this is why I have a certain amount of unease about Medium and writing for other spaces. Whenever I publish to my own little space on the web I get this feeling of adding to the greater corpus—no one might ever find it, no one might even ever read it (I removed Google analytics long, long ago so this might be the case), but linking to things still has a feeling of “a-ha! I see this!”</p>
Big data, no thanks2015-11-03T18:52:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/big-data-no-thanks/<p>An alluring, essential talk called <a href="http://booktwo.org/notebook/big-data-no-thanks/">Big data, no thanks</a> from James Bridle:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This is the first electronic general-purpose computer, the ENIAC, which was built at the University of Pennsylvania between 1941 and 1946. It was used extensively for Edward Teller’s early work on hydrogen bombs. The size of a couple of rooms, it had thousands of components and millions of hand-soldered connections.</p>
<p>The engineer Harry Reed, who worked on it, recalled that the ENIAC was “strangely, a very personal computer. Now we think of a personal computer as one which you carry around with you. The ENIAC was actually one that you kind of lived inside. So instead of you holding a computer, the computer held you.”</p>
</blockquote>
Six2015-11-02T11:09:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/six/<blockquote>
<p>(One remembers involuntarily and with goosebumps that in 1876–78, Edward Robert Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, First Earl of Lytton GCB GCSI GCIE PC (to whom, incidentally, Lady Windermere’s Fan was dedicated), serving as the Viceroy of India, considered himself to be doing well and doing good when he exported a record crop of grain from India to England while 5.5 million Indians died of starvation.)</p>
<p>[...] It serves me well by reminding me that mass anything is political. If one person is hungry, who knows, but if 50,000 people are hungry, what’s happening is necessarily a question of policy, of how we live together, of “who gets what, when, how”.</p>
<p>A first step, I think, is to remove any sense of inevitability. The Horn of Africa is not doomed to famines. It is prone to certain weather patterns that can lead to famine when other problems are also present. Which is true of everywhere. California is in a worst-in-1,200-years drought, but I am getting plenty of calories because, 😏🇺🇸 aside, we have mostly working politics. What’s happening in the Horn of Africa right now is worst-in-30-years, but there are likely people walking around today who will be dead of it before their next birthday. That’s a crop failure problem, and it’s a political failure problem.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Charlie Loyd’s newsletter, <a href="http://tinyletter.com/vruba">6</a>, feels like a masterclass on politics, environmental ethics and working in public.</p>
On Writing Well2015-10-07T07:59:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/on-writing-well/<p>William Zinsser's classic <em>On Writing Well</em> contains outstanding advice for writers, but the part I constantly think about is the section on editing:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Learn to enjoy this tidying process. I don't like to write; I like to have written. But I love to rewrite. I especially like to cut: to press the DELETE key and see an unecessary word or phrase vanish into the electricity. I like to replace a humdrum word with one that has more precision or color. I like to strengthen the transition between one sentence and another. I like to replace a drab sentence to give it more rhythm or a more graceful musical line. With every small refinement I feel that I'm coming nearer to where I would like to arrive, and when I finally get there I know it was the rewriting, not the writing, that won the game.</p>
</blockquote>
A Book of Sand2015-10-04T07:30:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/a-book-of-sand/<p>I'm in love with <a href="http://www4.wittenberg.edu/academics/mathcomp/shelburne/Infinity/notes/BookOfSand.html">this short story</a> by Borges:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>No, he replied. Then, as if confiding a secret, he lowered his voice. “I acquired the book in a town out on the plain in exchange for a handful of rupees and a Bible. Its owner did not know how to read. I suspect that he saw the Book of Books as a talisman. He was of the lowest caste; nobody but other untouchables could tread his shadow without contamination. He told me his book was called the Book of Sand, because neither the book nor the sand has any beginning or end.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The stranger asked me to find the first page.</p>
<p>I laid my left hand on the cover and, trying to put my thumb on the flyleaf, I opened the book. It was useless. Every time I tried, a number of pages came between the cover and my thumb. It was as if they kept growing from the book.</p>
Food and Sleep2015-09-28T18:59:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/food-and-sleep/<p>When an alcoholic describes their inexorable lust I realise it's precisely how I would describe my relationship with Food. Unlike drinking or smoking however, I still have to eat Food everyday. And not as a guilty compulsion, but as a necessity. This means that the temptation to gorge myself stupid, to destroy my waistline and push myself far beyond the final notch of my belt is an ever-present danger with every godforsaken meal.</p>
<p>Food has me obsessing over calories and fat and sugar and salt and daily allowances and not drinking fruit juice and going to the gym and pinching my waist and watching weak muscles grow strong. Timidly, but with a smile, I fight the dangerous old habits and, at the end of the day, I look at my body in the mirror and I think to myself <em>you can do better than this.</em></p>
<p>When I return from the gym it’s as if I'm peeling an extraneous layer of fat from my body. And even though I've programmed myself to nervously flinch away from the snack aisle now, that compulsion is still lurking there in the background. No matter how many miles I run or how many calories I burn, the sensation of wanting to devour a gelatinous mountain of cake is always there.</p>
<p>Maybe, I think to myself in these desperately bleak and boring moments, these gastronomically immoral acts might forever lurk and fester deep down in the belly of who I am.</p>
<p>The same can be said for Sleep. I refer to Sleep and Food in my mind as if they were the forgotten pair alongside Phlegm, Black Bile, Yellow Bile and Blood. They are constantly unbalanced— Sleep deprivation cuts into work and relationships and basic tasks that require more than 5% of brain activity. Food and Sleep are somehow connected; at 3am I will suddenly discover that the most important thing in the universe is the procurement of Food—sticky, soft and sweet. To defend myself against these thoughts I eat raisins, bags and bags of raisins, and somehow this soothes this penchant for midnight self destruction.</p>
<p>Why can’t I sleep? Perhaps because there's a feeling of things out there left undone, there's a sense of loss, of treasures abandoned, of Internets unseen.</p>
<hr />
<p>Months pass and I've forgotten the taste of chocolates, crisps and savoury snacks. I learn how to cook. Slowly and with much bumbling, I learn how to cook. But each time I learn how to not make the same fuck-up.</p>
<p>And in the shadow of so many fuck-ups all I can do is hope that tomorrow will be a day of fewer fuck-ups. Perhaps one day I'll forget the taste of a true and proper fuck-up, but until then I look into the mirror and I say to myself <em>you can do better than this.</em></p>
Viewsources podcast2015-09-18T22:36:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/viewsources-podcast/<p>A while back I had the pleasure of joining <a href="https://twitter.com/charlespeters">Charles Peters</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/tomcarmony">Tom Carmony</a> on <a href="https://viewsourc.es/2015/09/18/episode-13-typography/">a special episode</a> of Viewsources all about typography and design. We talked about our favourite type systems, how to get started in the industry and how to make websites have great typography whilst still thinking about performance.</p>
<p>So considering this was the first podcast that I’ve ever been on I’m <em>very</em> happy with how things turned out. My cough button worked gloriously and there were only a few instances where I <em>ummmmmed</em> and <em>ughhhed</em> my way through the conversation. Next time I’ll be sure to come prepared with a proper mic though.</p>
XOXO 20152015-09-15T18:14:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/xoxo-2015/<p>It’s the final day of XOXO and I’m sat under a canopy watching the prolonged withdrawal of a beautiful evening — shadows flitter their way across skin left bare by shorts and dresses as everyone has now gathered outside after the talks. They slowly form clusters and talk giddily amongst friends at the open bar. Others can be found on the outer rim of the grounds, huddling around the embers of a little fire whilst the food trucks nearby begin to hunker down, ready for a night of well-earned slumber.</p>
<p>It’s possible to see all the work that’s left to be done, right there on the faces of those in attendance; all the websites and sculptures, all the comic books and novels in progress — they’re just waiting to be pushed out into the world. This weekend has lit the coals beneath our feet and so, even though everyone is sad to leave, there’s a sense that if we all listen carefully enough we might begin to hear the whispers of our desks calling our names out into the wind.</p>
<p><em>We’re ready for work.</em></p>
<p>Although, what’s more important than the work that’s bound to flourish from this festival is the feeling that there are more smiles to be collected just yet. There are high-fives to be fived, and conversations that will soon hum with potential, dormant conversations which can only be kindled with beer or ice cream; amongst all this excitement it’s obvious that there are great friends here at XOXO that aren’t yet friends.</p>
<p>And there’s little time left, even if the evening is still young.</p>
<hr />
<p>On my first night in Portland I took a rambling walk across Hawthorne, and then onto Division Street where the fancy tea shops and the ice cream parlors (with lines that stretch around the corner) can be found. After my Sim-like ice cream status turned from red to green I decided to hop on the bus home.</p>
<p>A couple of stops later a woman stammered through the door. Clearly worn and bruised by daily life, she was followed by an older woman that handed her a phone number and some money.</p>
<p>“<em>Take this</em>,” she said, “<em>and call me when you get where you need to be, ok?</em>”</p>
<p>The young woman covered in scratches and bruises nodded to her companion, although it was plain to see that they had only just met one another a short moment ago. Someone was in dire need of help and a stranger had emerged from the streets of Portland to offer what little comfort she could.</p>
<hr />
<p>In the lead up to XOXO I’ve been thinking a great deal about what success now looks like to me. Over the past two years I’ve had the opportunity to accomplish so many of my young teenage dreams but this experience has left me with a sour, incomplete taste; goal posts shift as if they’d been set without care into desert sands.</p>
<p>After the spectacular events and friends that I’ve made at XOXO, and the ones I’m sure that I’ll continue to make tonight, I’m starting to feel like maybe I have an answer though. It has almost nothing to do with programming, or writing better code, or earning more money, or becoming the greatest designer that’s ever lived, or traveling around the world, or receiving recognition, or status, or fame.</p>
<p>All these pail in comparison to <a href="https://twitter.com/robinrendle/status/640987415033847810">the answer</a> I’ve found here.</p>
<p>And it’s this: at the beginning of the first day Andy Baio said that the festival is starting to look less like a conference or an event and more like a community. And it’s this community I want to encourage and improve, it’s this community that I want to nudge towards empathy and kindness and I want to help build tools for. I want to reach out to people in order to do whatever I can to offer help and assistance and I want to be a part of a group that encourages kindness and warmth, alongside stimulating acts of creativity.</p>
<p>I want to be more like that lady on the bus, handing over a tiny scrap of paper with a phone number on it to a complete stranger in need. I think that’s because success is really just a combination of small gestures; the steady hand on a shoulder, the random gifts of kindness.</p>
<p>And, for me at least, XOXO was a rich pool of these strange gifts.</p>
<hr />
<p><em>Thank you so much Andy, Andy, Rachel and everyone else involved.</em></p>
<p><em>XOXO has meant a lot to all of us.</em></p>
Making charts with CSS2015-08-18T14:47:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/making-charts-with-css/<p>In <em><a href="https://css-tricks.com/making-charts-with-css/">Making charts with CSS</a></em> over on CSS-Tricks I take a look at a few interesting ways to make bar charts, sparklines and pie charts without resorting to a JavaScript framework. Using JS isn’t necessarily a problem here but sometimes we don’t need extra resources and a lot of the time we can handle things with CSS.</p>
<p>I’m already making notes for the next post on making charts with SVG, so be sure to look out for that one too.</p>
Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan & Derelict2015-08-15T22:09:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/flotsam-jetsam-lagan-derelict/<p>I’m starting a newsletter called <a href="https://tinyletter.com/robinrendle">Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan and Derelict</a> where I’ll begin to publish a short story once every other week. This is a place to help me learn how to write dialogue and think about character development and encourage me to write a little more.</p>
<p>The name of this series comes from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flotsam,_jetsam,_lagan,_and_derelict">nautical terms for shipwrecks</a> as I like the metaphor in comparison. These will be notes that I’ve revived from the depths of my drafts folder – some of them are bound to be messy but there’ll always be a little <em>something</em> about them that’s worth investigating further.</p>
<p><a href="https://tinyletter.com/robinrendle">Sign up to the newsletter</a></p>
With teeth of metal and glass2015-06-24T16:09:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/with-teeth-of-metal-and-glass/<p>Since my early childhood I believed that I was a New Yorker in exile. The atmosphere, the energy; I gobbled up every part of it that leaked through a TV or found its way to me via magazines, posters and books. I felt that not only had I the misfortune to have been born in the wrong country with the wrong accent but I also believed that one day, if I tried my very best, then New York might adopt me as one of its own.</p>
<p>My excitement for a holiday to NYC was of paramount importance then: as someone that comes from a rural area, would I enjoy it? Would I want to emigrate to New York? What would my girlfriend and I find there? Would she move in with me once we came back or would we just throw caution to the wind and move to America and work together? Whilst on holiday, would we visit Broadway and stumble along Fifth Avenue, hand in hand, smiling?</p>
<p>What followed instead was a week of awkward silences and avoiding the inevitable. As we tried to prolong our relationship over the holiday it became a week of pretence; a week of tearful conversations in the early mornings and in the late evenings, a week of pleading and bargaining, a week of arguing over the semantics between taking a break and breaking up. It was a week of pushing two miserable people together and slinging them over Manhattan and back across the Brooklyn Bridge, where we slept in the same bed but where continents could fill the spaces in between.</p>
<p>It was unbearably heartbreaking and so I fled the city like a coward.</p>
<p>As the plane took off and banked left I stared into Manhattan’s voluminous belly and wondered where my girlfriend might be found somewhere inside. But in the fleeting moments before the end I watched the city turn towards me, his gums bulging with skyscrapers, and he smiled and I understood.</p>
<p>She is not my girlfriend and I am not from New York.</p>
<div class="m-wrapper--full">
<figure class="m-wrapper--unpadded">
<img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/tooth.jpg" alt="A skyscraper" />
</figure>
</div>
Chaining blend-modes2015-04-25T12:07:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/chaining-blend-modes/<p>I’ve been obsessed with blend modes over the past couple of weeks. First it started when I noticed how the Almanac was missing both <a href="https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/m/mix-blend-mode/"><code>mix-blend-mode</code></a> and <a href="https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/b/background-blend-mode/"><code>background-blend-mode</code></a> so I went ahead and fixed that.</p>
<p>Even though I’d been through the <a href="http://dev.w3.org/fxtf/compositing-1/#propdef-background-blend-mode">docs</a> and traversed <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/background-blend-mode">MDN</a> thoroughly for these posts I very almost missed that it’s possible to <a href="https://css-tricks.com/chaining-multiple-blend-modes/">chain blend modes</a> together when adding multiple images to a background. It’s pretty neat.</p>
Week notes #122015-04-18T14:16:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-12/<p>Working on a project with a styleguide for the first time is encouraging me to document my code a lot more than I usually do. It’s also surprising to reveal how little I truly understand about the complexities of <abbr>CSS</abbr> and writing code for other developers to work with. In other projects I’ve often been under an extreme deadline and this sort of pressure leads to terrible code.</p>
<p>Over the last few weeks my work with the folks at <a href="http://madebykind.com/">Kind</a> has revealed a lot of glaring flaws in my process and throughout this period <a href="http://www.tomdavies.net/">Tom</a> described to me how a styleguide improves the productivity of a developer. First, he said, most projects tend to follow this general trend:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/without-styleguide.jpg" alt="Without styleguide" /></p>
<p>At the beginning of a project a front-end dev is typically writing a lot of code very quickly and so everything feels very productive. Without a styleguide they can make mockups of several templates without worrying precisely how that code might be used in the future. But when new developers have to struggle with that legacy code they’ll find that their productivity will begin to falter and the rest of the project will be a fight uphill as they fight the cascade the whole time.</p>
<p>On a project that uses a styleguide however, that trendline is very different:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/with-styleguide.jpg" alt="With styleguide" /></p>
<p>When building a website component-by-component the process is slow and tedious. You might spend days sat in front of your screen and all you have to show for it is a few objects with great documentation. Yet slowly those pieces will be able to be snapped together like Lego and the documentation you laboured over in the beginning will come to your aid time and time again.</p>
<p>Whilst developing with styleguides we sacrifice the short-term pains of slow development with the long term benefits of a coherent design system.</p>
<p>Oh by the way, those charts above aren’t really mapping any sort of real-life data, what they do map is the general feeling of a front-end developer as they work.</p>
<hr />
<p>I read about <a href="http://www.dga.org/Craft/DGAQ/All-Articles/1502-Spring-2015/Shot-to-Remember-The-Sopranos.aspx">the design of the Sopranos</a> and its tense conclusion:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Meadow is filled with nothing but very, very deep emotions about parking her car. But possibly a minute later, her head will be filled with emotions she could never even imagine. We all take this stuff so seriously—losing our keys, parking our car, a winter cold, a summer cold, an allergy—whatever it is. And this stuff fills our mind from second to second, moment to moment. And the big moment is always out there waiting.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr />
<p>I also finished <em>Ready Player One</em> which is now my favourite book about video game culture. It’s adorable and smart and swamped in the lore of D&D, Japanese anime and Pacman.</p>
<hr />
<p>As I’m writing this I have this video of the Internet Archive and Brewster Kahle and <span>TERRACOTTA ARCHIVISTS</span> playing in the background:</p>
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NdZxI3nFVJs" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
Week notes #112015-04-11T18:05:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-11/<p>It’s been eleven weeks of these little notes and so much has changed over that time. I’m not really sure who’s reading them but hey these are really just for me to push myself to getting stuff done each week. In fact it’s sort of liberating if no-one’s reading because it means I can be a bit more candid than usual.</p>
<p>Onwards!</p>
<hr />
<p>This week I continued that freelance project <a href="http://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-9/">I briefly mentioned a couple of weeks ago</a>. The whole team at <a href="http://madebykind.com/">Kind</a> is smart and brilliant so it’s always a pleasure hanging out with them again.</p>
<hr />
<p>After <a href="http://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes/10">last week’s</a> exploration into the weirdness that is <code>background-blend-mode</code> I thought it’d be a good idea to learn a bit more about the <code>mix-blend-mode</code> property. Although I generally ignored it to begin with because of the browser support it really does let us make quite startling typographic layouts (in the few browsers that support it at least.)</p>
<p>Here’s a Pen where I outright stole the text from <a href="http://www.houseind.com/">House Industries’</a> post on their new typeface <a href="http://houseindustries.cmail1.com/t/ViewEmail/y/68885BCE0F413AE5/B9C37F14E9781D9EA7F290B8E8FDC6A0">Velo</a>:</p>
<p data-height="668" data-theme-id="0" data-slug-hash="gbNjGm" data-default-tab="result" data-user="robinrendle" class="codepen">See the Pen <a href="http://codepen.io/robinrendle/pen/gbNjGm/">mix-blend-mode demo</a> by Robin Rendle (<a href="http://codepen.io/robinrendle">@robinrendle</a>) on <a href="http://codepen.io/">CodePen</a>.</p>
<script async="" src="https://assets.codepen.io/assets/embed/ei.js"></script>
<p>That demo is using the <code>exclusion</code> attribute that’s available with this property but I also wanted to outline all of them just to see how they effect background-color, text and borders. In the following example I spice things up with a little JavaScript to toggle the CSS attribute on the WASHINGTON D.C. text:</p>
<p data-height="700" data-theme-id="0" data-slug-hash="wBLyLg" data-default-tab="result" data-user="robinrendle" class="codepen">See the Pen <a href="http://codepen.io/robinrendle/pen/wBLyLg/">mix-blend-mode</a> by Robin Rendle (<a href="http://codepen.io/robinrendle">@robinrendle</a>) on <a href="http://codepen.io/">CodePen</a>.</p>
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<p>Considering this is a journal about my work it’d be pretty hard to ignore my setup which now includes a <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dell-P2415Q-Premium-Widescreen-Monitor/dp/B00QAJ2MOM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1427891619&sr=8-1&keywords=Dell+P2415Q+24+Inch+IPS+4K+UHD+Premium+Widescreen+Monitor#productDetails">4K Dell monitor</a>. It’s perfect for my own needs since it’s relatively cheap and the pixel density is a pure wonder to design + develop with. Sure, you have to live with all the bullshit that comes with buying a Dell (like the awful documentation, the ugly packaging and the despicable logo on the front) but hey sometimes spending $2000 just to get everything packaged in a nice box with an apple on it isn't really necessary.</p>
<p>Generally my experience has been great with this screen and I’d thoroughly recommend it if you’re looking for early access to working at a crazy high resolution. Websites do look a little bit wonky and pixelated though, yet it’s reminded me that my own little place on the Internet is long overdue for an update.</p>
Week notes #102015-04-04T18:23:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-10/<p>This week I was recovering from a fever/cold/nightmare illness that left me with an awful lot of email and unfinished tasks ready for next week so unfortunately nothing much happened of note. I did help write <a href="https://css-tricks.com/bem-101/">a primer on BEM</a> though; it organises all of the current thinking about modular <abbr title="cascading style sheets">CSS</abbr> and why we might want to take that approach when we start work on large-scale front-ends.</p>
<p>I also started work on a post about <code>background-blend-mode</code> for the <a href="https://css-tricks.com/almanac/">Almanac</a> and it’s an interesting property that gives developers the ability to manipulate images, sort of like Photoshop. Here’s a quick demo I was messing around with:</p>
<p data-height="400" data-theme-id="12465" data-slug-hash="NPmpGK" data-default-tab="result" data-user="robinrendle" class="codepen">See the Pen <a href="http://codepen.io/robinrendle/pen/NPmpGK/">Background blend mode</a> by Robin Rendle (<a href="http://codepen.io/robinrendle">@robinrendle</a>) on <a href="http://codepen.io/">CodePen</a>.</p><script is:inline="" async="" src="https://assets.codepen.io/assets/embed/ei.js"></script>
<p>One of the cool things about front-end development is that you might have a string of projects which don’t require any of the latest properties or tools, so much so that when you try and figure out how they work it feels like designing things in the future. This is certainly the case with <code>background-blend-mode</code>, especially when you start chaining these values together for each layer of a background.</p>
<p>In the demo below I’ve tried to replicate a Miami Vice lookin’ 3D effect where two background-images are set slightly askew from one another whilst gradients are layered on top, each manipulated with a different blend mode:</p>
<p data-height="400" data-theme-id="12465" data-slug-hash="mygxoK" data-default-tab="result" data-user="robinrendle" class="codepen">See the Pen <a href="http://codepen.io/robinrendle/pen/mygxoK/">Gradients and background-blend-mode</a> by Robin Rendle (<a href="http://codepen.io/robinrendle">@robinrendle</a>) on <a href="http://codepen.io/">CodePen</a>.</p>
<p>Cool, huh? I’m not sure how useful this is in day-to-day front-end development but who cares when it’s this pretty?</p>
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<p>Next week there’ll be more about the redesign of the site, notes about a new office I’ll be moving into and some info about a couple of interesting posts I’m working on. </p>
Week notes #92015-03-27T19:59:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-9/<p>This week I’ve been in Nottingham working with the team at <a href="http://madebykind.com/">Kind</a> on a freelance gig. What’s particularly interesting is that this is the first project I’ve worked on that’s been styleguide-first—so before a single mockup is visible in the browser we’ve normalised the design into a programmatic language, written clear documentation for developers and considered the many various ways in which this codebase might change over time. It also forces me to write that code to a much higher standard than I might otherwise.</p>
<p>At the moment we’re using a fairly customised version of <a href="http://trulia.github.io/hologram/">Hologram</a> to help us plan this system of front-end components and I’m sure we’ll be sharing the final design at a later stage. Here’s what it looks like right now:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/styleguide.png" alt="Styleguide made with Hologram" /></p>
<p>The menu at the top displays all the different types of component and I’m still not happy with the naming conventions as I really dig the <a href="http://csswizardry.com/2015/03/more-transparent-ui-code-with-namespaces/">namespacing idea that Harry Roberts described</a> earlier this month. But anyway, we have the name of the current breakpoint in the top right which is useful for debugging things. And one really useful part of our styleguide is the ability to add a renderer that appends <code>contenteditable="true"</code> to the markup of an example. This is handy if we need to double-check the line-height of a heading, for example:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/headings.gif" alt="Editable headings in the styleguide" /></p>
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<p>Styleguide-first design and development makes sense for a host of reasons, most of which I tried to outline in <a href="https://speakerdeck.com/robinrendle/a-visual-lexicon">my talk last year</a>. I’m not sure I did a particularly great job at the time but there was one theme that emerged which still interests me:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/a-website-is-a-service.jpg" alt="A website is a service" /></p>
<p>I wish I took a closer look at this idea back then because the slide makes it sound kinda self-helpy. What I was trying to say was that a website is a service for users (it’s a tool that changes over time) but it’s also a service for designers and developers (they have to keep coming back to the codebase and making adjustments). This is what makes a website different to a book or a newspaper or television.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.gov.uk/">gov.uk</a> is one excellent example of a <em>website as a service</em>.</p>
<p>One reason why a styleguide is an invaluable asset for those services is the way it immediately sets up the team’s expectations. The designer must make compromises for the sake of normalising the system programmatically whilst developers are forced to acknowledge that their shitty code just won’t cut it anymore. They have to think beyond whacky hacks and short-term tricks.</p>
<p>Perhaps I’m preaching to a very bored and unenthusiastic choir, so I apologise if you’ve heard this all before, yet I feel that this cant be the case when I see lots of folks still calling themselves <em>product</em> designers without a hint of sarcasm. All their beautiful, pixel-perfect products are merely next year’s half-assed, poorly implemented services that another designer and developer must unfortunately inherit.</p>
<p>What it comes down to is this: there are no products on the web. It’s services all the way down.</p>
Week notes #82015-03-26T09:04:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-8/<p>The last fornight has been exceptionally busy so I sort of missed out on last week’s post, but I’ve finally managed to find a spare moment and so here it is in all its unedited glory:</p>
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<p><a href="http://typographica.org/">Typographica</a> published a collection of typeface reviews from the <a href="http://typographica.org/features/our-favorite-typefaces-of-2014/">best releases of 2014</a> and I was thrilled to contribute with <a href="http://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/apres/">my review of Apres</a> by Font Bureau:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/apres-specimen.png" alt="Apres specimen" /></p>
<blockquote>
<p>What is it about these letters that overpowers my senses, that makes me stare at each of them longingly? Is it in the flick of the lowercase ‘e’? Or perhaps I’m drawn to the restraint of the design or to the barely perceptible quirks that appear like hushed giggles on the screen. But then why are these large apertures, with their inscriptional characteristics, so attractive to me? And why am I brought to the edge of my seat by the long, outstretched descender of the ‘y’?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>For the rest of the month I’ll be plodding my way through the articles and stumbling through their many hidden treasures as their insights into the typographic world slowly reveal themselves. You may feel free to join me.</p>
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<p>Speaking of typefaces, a small amount of progress has been made on my redesign as I’ve finally settled on <a href="http://www.typonine.com/fonts/font-library/nocturno/">Nocturno</a> as the primary typeface. I found it last year when <a href="http://twitter.com/litherland">Caren Litherland</a> wrote <a href="http://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/nocturno/">her review</a> for Typographica and I’ve been dying to use it ever since:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/nocturno.png" alt="Nocturno" /></p>
<p>Nocturno has subsequently replaced <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/ideal-sans/overview/">Ideal Sans</a> as my default typeface for projects such as presentations, or emails or any other kind of typesetting that’s just for my own pleasure.</p>
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<p>In the redesign of this site I’ve been trying to learn as much as I possibly can about font loading because I want to use small caps and multiple weights of Nocturno without sacrificing performance. In fact, I want to add <em>more</em> font files whilst making the site <em>feel</em> a whole lot faster. But throughout these experiments whacky things have occurred, such as one typeface downloading (like the italic variant) whilst the fallback font Georgia is still on screen for a good long while:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/georgia-with-nocturno.png" alt="Georgia with Nocturno italics" /></p>
<p>This has led to a startling conclusion that I hadn’t really considered before: that the flash of unstyled text is in fact a Good Thing™ and performance is more important than ligatures or other typographic embellishments. It has to be said that a website stocked to the brim with Papyrus is far better than one which has hidden all of its content as it waits to download a fancy webfont: Verdana or Comic Sans or Arial is a better typeface than nothing at all.</p>
<p>This fundamentally changes the way I’ve thought about great typography on the web, as now I should really see the act of typesetting as a complicated spectrum of quirks and problems instead of an act that requires perfection: great typography is no longer a craft (eurgh) made up of absolute values and unbreakable rules.</p>
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<p>Over on CSS-Tricks I created the almanac entries for <a href="https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/i/image-rendering/">image-rendering</a> and <a href="https://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/w/will-change/">will-change</a>, the latter definitely requires a little demo or something which I’ll update some time this month. But the image-rendering property is really hard to write about because of the weird browser support at the moment.</p>
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<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/ie_books.jpg" alt="Bookspace" /></p>
<p>In my spare time I’ve been reading <a href="http://inland-editions.com/">Inland Editions’</a> kickstarted publication about libraries called <em>Bookspace</em>. <a href="https://twitter.com/poplastik">Maria Inês</a>, one of the cofounders of this delightful venture <a href="https://lestroischaises.wordpress.com/2015/03/13/bookspace-collected-essays-on-libraries/">wrote a little about the project</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The book focuses on the current development of library spaces as public institutions through the perspective of architects, writers, librarians, and readers. It addresses the architecture of modern public spaces, and the development of library collections in the age of digital information, in order to discuss the larger social context of libraries as institutions. Bookspace provides an insight into their management and how their functions are changing.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sounds pretty great, right? I’m particularly fond of the book’s focus on the practical nature of libraries and their physical contents rather than the ephemeral qualities of reading. For example, in an extended interview with David Pearson, the Director of Culture, Heritage and Libraries at the City of London Corporation, he goes on to argue that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Libraries are expensive places to run, an aspect of all this that is easily lost sight of, particularly if you are thinking of it from a purely academic perspective. So the question is: Are we sure that the books that go into the pulping mill are not ones that have got those other kinds of values that we might actually want to hang on to? There are after all millions of 20th-century books that are identical, that have no distinguishing features, nobody has written or made notes in them. How many copies of those do we need for textual purposes?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s these sorts of problems that feature in <em>Bookspace</em> rather than the much treaded ground of how a book should feel or smell, an affectation of which <a href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/02/08/the-journey-from-writer-to-reader/">I am sometimes guilty</a>. So if smart, well-researched writing about books and libraries is your jam then you should definitely pick up a copy for yourself.</p>
Week notes #72015-03-14T16:55:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-7/<p>On Monday I published an article about the <a href="https://css-tricks.com/using-the-html5-history-api/">HTML5 History API</a>. It’s sort of crazy to think that I contribute to <span class="caps">CSS</span>-Tricks on a daily basis now, especially since I’ve been following <a href="https://twitter.com/chriscoyier">Chris’</a> work for almost a decade. Back when I just started web development I had become immediately intoxicated by his website’s humility, nuance and grace, despite the overall trend of tech-focused websites.</p>
<p><span class="caps">CSS</span>-Tricks has been, and will always be, a bastion against all things snark and so I’m honoured to help in any way I can.</p>
<h2 id="a-note-on-technical-writing" tabindex="-1">A note on technical writing <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-7/#a-note-on-technical-writing" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>I’m not particularly familiar with writing code-based blog posts. If you skim the archives of my notes then you’ll find that pretty much all of them tend to push fiercely away from code-based examples. I suppose what I’m saying is that they were think-pieces (sigh) because I always felt intimidated whenever I talked about my love for Sass, or weird JavaScript things or any side of the technical underbelly of the web. I’ve watched the uglier parts of this community prey on the young and the naïve and I’d rather not be heard at all than experience the vitriol that’s been slung in their direction.</p>
<p>So I wrote stories and weird book reviews instead, but ignoring technical writing was foolish because documenting a specific problem (such as a demo for <a href="https://css-tricks.com/spriting-img/">inline SVG sprites</a>) requires a completely different set of skills from fiction or think-piece writing.</p>
<p>You have to draw a line at one point or another around your audience and their technical prowess. Do you have to explain how inline images work? Or the peculiarities of the <span class="caps">DOM</span>? Where do you begin? Is it patronising for the majority of readers if you take the easy way out and explain a concept with jQuery? Or is it instead insulting if you disregard the troubles that less experienced folks might experience with this example?</p>
<p>The trouble is this: to write some CSS you must first <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s664NsLeFM">invent the universe</a>.</p>
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<p>Besides that I’ve been working on a redesign of my personal website and so I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I want from it in the coming years. First I’m thinking about basic UX and organization (I love the idea of <a href="http://warpspire.com/posts/url-design/">URL-first design</a>) and I want to write a lot more fiction so the site will need to compensate for that. Afterwards I’ll move onto basic performance improvements, switching hosts and, of course, typesetting.</p>
<p>The impetus for setting typographic details should always start from a reading of the text, hence my return to older posts in order to see how my writing style has changed over time. By next week I’ll have a general typographic system that I’ll dig into a little bit and show what I’m thinking about.</p>
Week notes #62015-03-06T21:17:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-6/<p>This week I’ve been messing around with a few side projects after a month of heavy freelance work and subsequently I’ve been trying to play catch up with the backlog of articles, talks and posts about front-end development that I’ve let slip by. Earlier in the week I also found some time to write a little about <a href="http://robinrendle.com/reading/you/">YOU</a> by Austin Grossman (which should be your go-to novel if you’re a fan of video games).</p>
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<p>A few days ago <a href="https://twitter.com/bram_stein">Bram Stein</a> wrote an interesting post about the <a href="https://dev.opera.com/articles/state-of-web-type/">state of web type</a> — my particular grievance here being with the sheer lack of hyphenation support. We now have the ability to move elements in the <abbr title="Document object model">DOM</abbr> and manipulate a web page to dance and flicker like a native application, but the very basics of typesetting, which designers have taken for granted for the past five hundred years, are still unavailable to us on the web.</p>
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<p>I read through the documentation for <a href="http://primercss.io/guidelines/">Primer</a>, GitHub’s best practices and guidelines for front-end development and high-fived my way through pretty much every suggestion. One problem I’ve run into lately is adding an unnecessary parent class to a component, a practice that GitHub questions in those docs.</p>
<p>On a similar note Philip Walton posted a a bit about <a href="http://philipwalton.com/articles/side-effects-in-css/">Side Effects in CSS</a> which is definitely worth a read if you’ve yet to put <abbr title="Block element modifier">BEM</abbr> to the test.</p>
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<p>For some reason today I’ve had more than the recommended daily dosage of interstellar space, thanks in some part to <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b050bwpp">this broadcast</a> that documents the sounds of the great void, along with its magnetic fields and bubbling moons and hyperactive pulsar beacons. Later in the day I watched Phil Plait describe <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlWpFLfLFBI">how the tides work</a> and shortly after that I read a fascinating post by <a href="http://lifewinning.com/">Ingrid Burrington</a> where she takes <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/03/the-failed-attempt-to-destroy-early-gps/386656/">a look at <abbr>GPS</abbr></a> and its implications on our modern world.</p>
<p>THEN! I read about the <em>Groundhog day</em> phenomena whereby scientists have watched a star explode over and over again thanks to the gravitational lens of a galaxy in an effect known to us as <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/06/science/astronomers-observe-supernova-and-find-theyre-watching-reruns.html?referrer=">The Einstein Ring</a>.</p>
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<p>On a completely unrelated note, <a href="https://twitter.com/moxie">Moxie</a>’s <a href="http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/career-advice/">career advice</a> is pretty goddamn fantastic. Especially the point where he talks about an institution (such as a school or university) forcing its constituents to follow a certain path:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When we arrive at the ends of these funnels, it’s possible that the direction we’re facing is more a reflection of those structures than it is a reflection of ourselves. Self-determination in a moment like that can’t simply be about making a choice, it has to start with transforming the conditions that constitute our choices. It requires challenging the “self” in “self-determination” by stepping as far outside of those supporting structures as possible, for as long as possible.</p>
</blockquote>
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<p>That’s a wrap.</p>
<p>One more thing I wanted to briefly go over is the talk I mentioned a while back, the one that’s called <em>A brief and scattered history of letters</em>. It’s starting to gather itself in my mind as I hope to unbundle all the ideas that have been racing around up there. Here’s a sneak peak at the intro:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the beginning there was the word, or so we’re told.</p>
<p>But what did that word look like? I’m talking here about the prehistoric culture of symbols which began when the first word was cast into brick, or traced in the sand, or painted on the walls of a cave. I want to know what that first word looks like because, as Zoketsu Norman Fischer writes: “[We] can only see as far as we can say” and so language is, both in its linguistic and its visual representation, the history of our recovering blindness.</p>
<p>The design of language makes up the history of what we know as well as the history of how we know what we know; without words we repeat the mistakes of our ancestors because without words there are no records of those failures. We are dumb and scattered tribes without them.</p>
<p>Consequently without the very first word we are left without a beginning to our story so of course we must start with its end.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I only quote from this very early draft of whatever this talk will become since I’m always surprised when I write something and it doesn’t carry my voice. I mean, I’m not sure I have a voice when I write but there’s been a few moments when I sit back and I don’t recognise myself in the words.</p>
<p>It’s just peculiar is all.</p>
You2015-03-01T23:05:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/you/<p>There are stories that appear to grasp all of my thoughts and loves and ideas right out of thin air and hurl them onto the pages of a book. These moments are few and far between but lately I had that very experience with <em>You</em>, a novel about video game design written by <a href="http://austingrossman.dreamhosters.com/about-me">Austin Grossman</a>.</p>
<p>It’s a book that appeared to jump into my bag unexpectedly as soon as I recognised the art style in the bookshop as the front cover was clearly adorned with an illustration from <a href="http://www.superbrothershq.com/">Superbrothers</a> and of course I knew that a special something must lie inside.</p>
<p><em>You</em> is the story of a games designer and the novel follows this character’s experience of working on a fictitious, open-world <abbr title="Role playing game">RPG</abbr> for the <em>Realms</em> franchise. This is a series of games about hit points and Dark Elves, ancient mines filled to the rafters with orcs and endless fields sprinkled with wolves, thieves and the occasional ice giant. Yet besides these mysteries, within the code of the game itself lies a world-ending glitch that drives the design team to the brink of insanity; our protagonist must find the glitch before the game ships and save their creation from the quirks and eccentricities of the designer that came before them. It’s a video game murder mystery!</p>
<p>Although reading a book that finally <em>gets</em> what games are all about was terribly exciting, it was Grossman’s curiosity that’s bound up in <em>You</em> that had me on the edge of my seat:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>Realms 1.0</em> was just the beginning: they would build and build into <em>2.0</em> and <em>20.0</em>, into cities and kingdoms and systems within systems and interfaces within interfaces and princesses and starships and submarines and grassy fields and volcanoes and floating cities and laughing gods and blackest hells and on and on, because there would always be something else there over the next hill, beyond the turning in the road, down the dark hallway and into the next room, and somewhere in there you’ll escape at last, escape yourself and forget and forget and forget and live in a story forever.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The first time I played <a href="http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_IV:_Oblivion"><em>Oblivion</em></a>, which is a very similar franchise to the fictitious world that Grossman describes, I wondered at the game’s potential, its infinite stories, its open, unbound freedom. For months the shared experiences of this game were cross-examined in friendly arguments and forums online; <em>Oblivion</em> could blossom with so many choices that we all questioned whether or not we had played some part in its design: would we steal that loaf of bread today or would we sneak out underneath the stars? Would we spend our mornings being chased by wooly mammoths and their giant companions, or would we instead choose to explore the sewers in the hope that we might stumble upon the contaminated lair of the Brotherhood?</p>
<p>As far as I can remember though, <em>Oblivion</em> was never a game which took itself very seriously: the designers were well-aware that the game was about orcs and demons and portals to hellish dimensions, and I’m reminded of it because Grossman captures this feeling precisely with his <em>Realms</em> series, too:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>History progressed, blissfully free of historical or political or technological progress. Kingdoms rose and fell over the millennia, but there was no trend toward democracy, no Enlightenment, no industrial modernity, no Luther, no Hume, and absolutely, definitely no gunpowder. No <em>Principia Mathemetica</em> or Declaration of Independence. We held certain truths to be self-evident, but those truths were that elves hate orcs and wizards can’t wear metal armour.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The book also discusses the role of stories in video games, namely, <em>how do you tell a great story without taking away the control of the player</em>? Cutscenes! Level design! The benefits of using fire arrows over magic spells! It’s these sorts of ideas that are discussed in the book and we see the protagonist strip a video game to its most basic components in order to find out how he can put them back together in ways we’ve never seen.</p>
Week notes #52015-02-27T19:20:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-5/<p>I’m feeling pretty guilty about what I’ve accomplished over the past seven days; right now I’m at that troubling stage of freelance work (which I assume everyone passes through at one stage or another) where I’ve promised far too much to people. Setting high expectations of myself and my work is important, yet over-promising and under-delivering now ensures that I’m starting to let people down in small but unforgivable ways. In short, I’ve been letting things slip through my fingers; deadlines, bills, promises unkept.</p>
<p>So I’ll be taking the whole of next week to reorganise my approach and to ensure that there are healthy gaps between jobs. I shouldn’t feel exhausted all the time and I shouldn’t feel as if, to impress one person, I have to let another down — this small-stakes emotional Ponzi scheme has to end one way or another.</p>
<hr />
<p>This week <a href="http://twitter.com/timbrown">Tim</a> recorded his talk from <a href="http://aneventapart.com/">AEA</a> called <a href="https://vimeo.com/ondemand/bodytext"><em>Typesetting Body Text Like a Pirate Jedi with a DeLorean</em></a> and there is some spectacular advice in here about how to train your eye and set the page. But not only does Tim give great advice about typesetting, he also takes a calm and soothing approach in general, entirely absent of hubris or confrontation and because of this I’m pretty sure I could listen to him talk about type all day long.</p>
<p>Listening to this talk encourages me to tackle my own idea which I’ve been playing with for a while.</p>
<hr />
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/yayitsrob">Robinson Meyer</a> wrote a post about <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/02/what-blogging-has-become/386201/">what blogging has become</a> — but no, wait! Don’t go, I’m serious. It’s really, very good and you should read it. Rob describes the ‘New Medium’ and how writing has changed on the web over the past couple of years:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s impossible to pretend, in 2015, in a culture that understands what <a href="https://stories.californiasunday.com/2015-03-01/black-lives-matter/">#BlackLivesMatter</a> means, that corporate-owned social media have not shaped social movements and as a consequence changed U.S. mass politics. Assumptions built into blogging, assumptions once worth marvelling at, have become part of the firmament of the U.S. cultural sphere.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m not sure I entirely agree with his outlook about personal websites towards the end though, as I think personal websites/blogs/whatever are still the raddest part of the internet.</p>
<hr />
<p>The team at Trello wrote some interesting notes about <a href="https://gist.github.com/bobbygrace/9e961e8982f42eb91b80">their approach to CSS</a>. Lots of little things in here are bugs that I’ve replicated again and again, but hopefully I’ll know better now.</p>
<hr />
<p>After the finale of <em>Parks and Recreation</em> yesterday I felt a great well of sadness bubble up because I loved that TV show to bits — it was so optimistic and quick-witted and anti-snark.</p>
<p>Consequently <a href="https://twitter.com/antiheroine">Jen Myers</a> wrote a lovely piece about the protagonist <a href="http://thereportmargins.com/on-leslie-knope.html">Leslie Knope</a>, played by the amazing Amy Poehler, and why her character was an inspiration.</p>
Week Notes #42015-02-20T20:09:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-4/<p>These are some notes about my working week. There are <a href="https://twitter.com/robinrendle/status/561255710567460865">rules</a> that I break trying to write them.</p>
<hr />
<p>This week I’ve been thinking about how to tighten up my process for developing websites and I wondered how I might tidy up all those little itchy problems that irk me on a daily basis.</p>
<p>So I stumbled over the <a href="http://pesticide.io/">Pesticide</a> Chrome extension by <a href="http://mrmrs.cc/">mrmrs</a>, which is super handy for figuring out weird layout bugs visually. I’m not going to include it in a project’s CSS because I think that would probably make things quite confusing, but as an independent browser plugin it’s bound to be extraordinarily useful.</p>
<p>On a similar note I’ve realised that OSX’s Finder is a terrible way to navigate files and folders. This encouraged me to spend a portion of the week dedicated to writing custom <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-4/www.alfredapp.com">Alfred 2</a> workflows. The first allows me to type ‘w’ followed by the name of a post and Alfred will fetch that file from Dropbox and open it in <a href="https://ia.net/writer/mac/">Writer</a>. That doesn’t sound like a big deal but when you’re opening and closing posts whilst navigating the broken UI of the Finder all day it becomes a life saver. Likewise I’ve done the same for Sublime Text, where I can simply type <code>sb</code> and the name of a directory in the <code>Projects</code> folder. This will then open that project in the sidebar of a new Sublime window. It’s sure to save me a lot of typing and mouse-clicking.</p>
<h2 id="noteworthy-listens" tabindex="-1">Noteworthy listens <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-4/#noteworthy-listens" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kc1htX3q-F0">Sleater-Kinney meets Bob’s Burgers</a> is now my classic go-to tune for some butt-shaking time.</li>
<li>The new José González album <em>Vestiges & Claws</em> has certainly been on repeat, too.</li>
<li>Thanks to a suggestion from <a href="http://twitter.com/charlotte_dann">Charlotte</a> I returned to an incredible episode from 99% Invisible that I missed called <a href="http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/wild-ones-live/"><em>Wild Ones Live</em></a> (it’s the sort of episode where you’ll end up using all the emojis to describe it.)</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="reading-browsing-surfing" tabindex="-1">Reading, browsing, surfing <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-4/#reading-browsing-surfing" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>I’ve been preoccupied with a lot of other things this week so reading has taken a side note for the time being, although I did churn through <a href="http://scottmccloud.com/category/the-sculptor/"><em>The Sculptor</em></a> by Scott McCloud in a single evening.</p>
<p>Oh and <a href="https://twitter.com/kupfers">Indra Kupferschmid</a> wrote a post called <a href="http://kupferschrift.de/cms/2015/02/typography-on-the-web/"><em>Typography on the web</em></a> and I loved every bit of it. She writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Typography hits us on two different levels: by the look of it, telling us if this is something we may like or should be interested in, and by the necessity to read it. If we have to read this time table, contract or assembling instruction we will do so regardless of its looks. We may find it more or less comfortable to read but our brains are incredibly capable of deciphering the most cryptic glyphs in context.</p>
</blockquote>
Week notes #32015-02-13T21:24:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-3/<p>This week I signed my first <abbr title="Non-disclosure agreement">NDA</abbr> and worked with the team at #######. I had a great time doing a lot of ########. Of course there might have been one or two ##### ####### but then again it could have been ###### # #######. I’m very much looking forward to this ##### and consequently ########## #### becoming a real thing.</p>
<p>In other news there isn’t much other news. On the side I’ve been writing for a couple of my favourite publications, although nothing’s ready to talk about just yet. That sounds like bragging and it totally isn’t bragging, I’m just saying that hey these things take time and some of my week notes might be a little sparse—and that’s ok: <em>festina lente</em>.</p>
<h2 id="non-work-related-notes" tabindex="-1">Non-work related notes <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-3/#non-work-related-notes" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Of all the many secret dating services that are out there, <a href="http://codepen.io/">Codepen</a> is my favourite.</p>
<hr />
<p>I’ve been munching over that bit in <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tigerman-Nick-Harkaway/dp/043402287X"><em>Tigerman</em></a> where the protagonist is thinking about what success looks like when it arrives:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>More progress. Part of him was almost alarmed, but he knew it happened this way sometimes, knew that when it did you had to ride the wave and choose your options well to keep it under your feet. It looked like a sudden turn for the better because humans saw what was in front of them, didn’t look at the time spent getting to a certain point. This was not a day of success, it was the success of many days, the pay-off of effort.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr />
<p>A host of whiney, East coast indie-rockers have been keeping my ears busy this week:</p>
<ul>
<li>I’ve especially been listening to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtePaSU5Lpg">Roland</a> over and over and over and over again.</li>
<li>And this live version of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yhj2RqqT1O8">I Will Possess Your Heart</a></li>
<li>Oh and on a completely unrelated note I’ve started digging into <a href="https://soundcloud.com/nosuchthingasafish">No Such Thing as a Fish</a></li>
</ul>
<hr />
<p>Earlier today <a href="http://twitter.com/vruba">Charlie</a> said some awfully smart and space-lovin’ words on the <a href="https://www.mapbox.com/blog/dscovr/">Mapbox blog</a> about <abbr>DSCVOR</abbr>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The main goal of DSCOVR’s Earth observation is to improve climate models. By continuously measuring how the atmosphere, land, and water of the planet absorb and reflect sunlight, scientists will learn more about long-term patterns and trends. The science is vital, but I’m more interested in the images themselves. If we think of the famous Blue Marble photograph from Apollo 17 in 1972 as a portrait, DSCOVR will be a webcam: a picture of our homeworld updating in near-realtime, in constant motion through days and seasons.</p>
</blockquote>
Week notes #22015-02-06T22:25:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-2/<p>These are some unedited notes about my week. <a href="https://twitter.com/robinrendle/status/561255710567460865">There are rules</a>. Let’s begin:</p>
<hr />
<p>Freelance work is starting to gain traction, at least according to the data I’m seeing from <a href="http://cushionapp.com/">Cushion</a>, a great tool for freelancers which helps me track the projects I’m currently working on. Even though it’s described as a paid beta, there’s little about the service that gives you that impression. The writing is clear and consistent, the sign up process is a delight and the interface shows me how financially turbulent this year might turn out to be if I don’t pull my finger out.</p>
<h2 id="sasha-bruce-youthwork" tabindex="-1">Sasha Bruce Youthwork <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-2/#sasha-bruce-youthwork" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p><a href="http://sashabruce.org/">Sasha Bruce Youthwork</a> is a charity based in Washington D.C. that helps homeless and runaway children, and I worked on the front-end for a <a href="http://sashabruce.org/40/">new event website</a> which celebrates their 40th anniversary. The project only lasted a couple of days but I’m relatively happy with the results. This was the first time I used the <code>picture</code> element and seriously pushed back against the need for adding jQuery to a project. Yay for progressive enhancement and performance! Yay for charities making the world a better place!</p>
<h2 id="css-tricks" tabindex="-1">CSS-Tricks <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-2/#css-tricks" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>On Sunday I joined the writing staff at CSS-Tricks and I posted two quick updates to the Almanac: the <a href="http://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/o/object-fit/"><code>object-fit</code></a> and <a href="http://css-tricks.com/almanac/properties/o/object-position/"><code>object-position</code></a> CSS properties. For now this property isn’t particularly exciting (since the browser support isn’t that great) but look out for them in the future because I guarantee they’ll turn out to be really useful.</p>
<p>These properties allow us to add background-images or colors to any object (such as a video or an image), which was sort of possible before, although now we have more fine-grain control over that process.</p>
<p>We can do odd things with these properties, such as make an <a href="http://css-tricks.com/spriting-img/">inline-image sprite</a>. Weird, huh?</p>
<h2 id="codepen" tabindex="-1">Codepen <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-2/#codepen" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Speaking of CSS-Tricks, I’m starting to fall in love with <a href="http://codepen.io/">Codepen</a>. For some reason I’ve always thought it was cool but I never really understood why it was more useful than the plethora of alternative tools that let you write code in the browser. However, as I was learning about some JavaScripty things earlier in the week I stumbled upon the greater community of developers, game designers and framework-builders, hundreds and hundreds of people that want to experiment with the underlying technology of front-end development and ultimately want nothing more than to share with you what they know.</p>
<p>Unlike those other services, I’ve already met incredibly smart people and found new ways in which to improve my own work. To put it briefly: I think Codepen is the front-end playground equivalent of Readmill, the defunct reading service which I drooled over at every opportunity whilst it was around because it was a tool that let you discover books and bookish-friends.</p>
<p>Anyway, you can check out <a href="http://codepen.io/robinrendle">my profile</a> to see what I might be working on + testing in the future.</p>
<h2 id="things-that-went-into-my-eyes-and-ears" tabindex="-1">Things that went into my eyes and ears <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-2/#things-that-went-into-my-eyes-and-ears" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Usually I can’t listen to podcasts or videos whilst I work, but at one point or another I checked out <a href="https://soundcloud.com/hrishihirway/song-exploder-no-22-the-books">The Books on Song Exploder</a> and it was great. Other noteworthy moving-picture-sound-things include:</p>
<ul>
<li>A <a href="http://www.merlinmann.com/roderick/bonus-roderick-on-the-line-live-at-verdi-club-sf.html">live recording of Roderick on the Line</a>, of course.</li>
<li>Invisibilia’s <a href="http://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/377515477/fearless">story about fear</a>.</li>
<li><a href="http://gimletmedia.com/show/reply-all/">Reply-All</a>’s everything.</li>
<li>A <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsDc1YVxHA0">speed run of Psychonauts</a> with the original design team.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="books-etc" tabindex="-1">Books, etc <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-2/#books-etc" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Last night I started reading <em>You</em> by Austin Grossman and I’m going to write my thoughts up once I finish it but for me this book feels like the spiritual successor to <em>Close to the Machine</em> (in other words I can’t possibly describe right now how much I’m enjoying this novel at the moment).</p>
<p>It’s a book about making video games from an actual, honest-to-goodness games designer and it’s a book about technology and storytelling and it captures so much of what I’ve wanted someone to say about the art form.</p>
<h2 id="where-am-i" tabindex="-1">Where am I? <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-2/#where-am-i" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>I’m sat on the train heading back to Devon after a couple of days in London where I worked on some freelance projects and I’m buzzing with excitement. It’s late at night and it’s cold outside—the flitter of bulbs that rock by appear to be cast in a formidable bubble of icy darkness—however I’m still recovering from the capital’s ability to blush, ache and sigh whimsically with potential.</p>
<p>On the train out of Devon the carriages are crowded, yet as you watch the countryside pass you by you’ll get the distinct impression of warming your toes in a bath. Foliage and hills glide past the window as if you were being swept across the country in a hot tub that was attached to a magic carpet, but travelling back towards Plymouth the carriages will spew their insides; these journeys are always dark, they are always cold and they are always very lonely.</p>
<p>On the return journey there is a newfound awareness that you happen to be sitting in an uncomfortable seat from a rumbling, belching, wheezing old train that munches itself stupid on coal, and now, to your utter horror, you must listen to the conductor when he half-heartedly claims that this is the train headed to “the Cornish Riviera.”</p>
Week notes #12015-01-30T19:12:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-1/<p>This is the beginning of a new side project in which every Friday evening I’ll write for thirty minutes about what I’ve been working on over the past seven days. For a while I’ve been stashing these notes in private but I’ve finally decided to start publishing them because I want to recognise what I’ve accomplished, what I’ve screwed up and what I can do better come Monday morning.</p>
<p>So to kick things off, this is what I’ve been working on:</p>
<h2 id="strtr" tabindex="-1">strtr <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-1/#strtr" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>At the beginning of each web design project I often return to the project I just finished, copying and pasting bits of code as I go. This feels haphazard and unorganised to say the least; I want to spend more of my time building a website rather than dealing with the tedious interlinking of dependencies that I commonly have to work with.</p>
<p>This is where <a href="https://github.com/robinrendle/strtr">strtr</a> comes in. It’s a simple, relatively neutral strting™ point for small-to-medium sized websites. It contains the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>An <code>index.html</code> file with best practices for writing clean, semantic markup.</li>
<li>A CSS reset is imported with regular ol’ Sass.</li>
<li>Gulp tasks which ought to: - compile Sass - minimise the CSS output - optimise images + SVGs</li>
</ul>
<p>For this <a href="https://github.com/paulrobertlloyd/barebones">Barebones</a>-esque project I’m hoping to avoid tools such Compass or Bourbon as ideally this should give me the autonomy to pick whichever Sass or JS framework or CMS or templating system I’ll need for a particular project.</p>
<p>We’ll see how this goes but for now it’s already saved me about an hour of fiddling with dependencies.</p>
<h2 id=".dotfiles" tabindex="-1">.dotfiles <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-1/#.dotfiles" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>As I was messing around with strtr I tried to run a command that basically gave my laptop <a href="https://twitter.com/robinrendle/status/560113019251077120">a heart attack</a>. It was nothing serious but it gave me the incentive to run a fresh copy of Yosemite with everything set to their natural defaults. Pruning your operating system with a fine tooth comb feels really good and thanks to Backblaze I didn’t lose any data in the process (get yourself a backup, y’all).</p>
<p>Anyway, in the past I’ve stuck to using <a href="https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles">THE dotfiles</a> without any personal customization and this led to an awful amount of developer-guilt. So I decided to get <a href="https://github.com/robinrendle/dotfiles">my own dotfiles</a> sorted out once and for all.</p>
<p><a href="http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/setting-up-a-mac-dev-machine-from-zero-to-hero-with-dotfiles--net-35449">This tutorial on Tuts+</a> was particularly helpful for understanding the nitty gritty details of which file does what and how to get started making your own.</p>
<h2 id="a-better-javascript" tabindex="-1">A better JavaScript <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-1/#a-better-javascript" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>In my spare time I worked on a dummy project to play around with <a href="http://jspm.io/">jspm</a> and oh boy does it feel like a nice way to write JavaScript. The complexity of modules and using AMD and incorporating jQuery into a project has always felt like an uncertain, hazy and complicated mess to me. However with Traceur and System.js added to a project, writing classes and using ES6 feels glorious in comparison. On the next project I’m going to try this out for sure.</p>
<h2 id="picture-problems" tabindex="-1">Picture problems <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-1/#picture-problems" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>I also tried a weird thing with the <code>picture</code> element which was pretty dumb.</p>
<p>Let’s say we have 3 images visible on a small viewport and on desktop sizes there should be 5 images on display. Instead of hiding those images with CSS (where the files will still load in many browsers despite their invisibility) or writing whacky JS I wanted to figure out a way to do this with markup and <a href="https://github.com/scottjehl/picturefill">Picturefill</a>.</p>
<p>So if you include the <code>source</code> element and fill in the necessary <code>media</code> attributes BUT remove the <code>src</code> tag of the image inside the <code>picture</code> element then images are not present on mobile yet they are progressively loaded in at wider viewports. Euruka!</p>
<p>Let’s just go ahead and ignore the fact that Chrome happens to be the only browser that supports this behaviour. In this instance hiding the <code>img</code> tags that didn’t load properly in other browsers made a cool idea unforgivably disgusting. Although, I am surprised I couldn’t find anything written about loading inline images like this elsewhere.</p>
<h2 id="talk-ideas" tabindex="-1">Talk ideas <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-1/#talk-ideas" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>I’ve begun work on my next talk which I’ve decided to call <em>A brief and scattered history of letters</em>. In a single evening I had the intro, the end and the title pop into my head out of nowhere and I realised that over the next year what I really want to accomplish, as a sort of personal goal, is to set a firm timeline as to which events were important in the history of communication. I can recount the work of figures such as Gutenberg and Fournier or Benton and Haultin but fitting them onto a timeline is impossible without a search engine; dates smudge together and I often realise that I’ve mistaken one figure for another.</p>
<p>So I want to explore these odd, printed shapes that we call letters and how they influence our daily lives yet I also want to figure out how they influenced each other, in a particular order, too.</p>
<h2 id="books-etc." tabindex="-1">Books, etc. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/week-notes-1/#books-etc." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>I’ve been rereading <a href="https://hyphenpress.co.uk/products/books/978-0-907259-42-8">Counterpunch</a>, perhaps my favourite book on design in general, and on returning to <a href="http://robinrendle.com/reading/counterpunch/">my review</a> I can see that I got pretty damn close to describing just how good it really is.</p>
<p>As a side note I picked up <a href="http://www.nickharkaway.com/books/tigerman/">Tigerman</a> a couple of days ago and I immediately fell in a deep and insatiable love for the world Nick Harkaway imagines. And now I discover that he has an honest to goodness WEBSITE with a BLOG where he LINKS to things like the Force Awakens trailer with the crazy lightsaber, or what he describes as the ”Wibbly Sword Of Evil Flames.”</p>
<p>This is undoubtedly where I’ll be camped out for the next week or so.</p>
The Glut is Good2015-01-10T18:01:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-glut-is-good/<p><a href="http://www.hughhowey.com/the-glut-is-good/">Hugh Howey</a> on the self-publishing industry:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For every high-cost producer out there getting squeezed by falling prices (which includes indies who have run up their living costs and/or operations costs), there are legions of people who have day jobs and enjoy writing in their spare time. There will always be avid readers out there who dream of writing their own stories. They don’t have New York skyscrapers to rent out. They don’t have assistants to pay. They didn’t quit their day jobs last year hoping their breakout sales will continue indefinitely. These are just the next generation of those who possess an active imagination, a dream, and the persistence to finish what they start.</p>
</blockquote>
The Ground Beneath Her Feet2014-12-17T23:14:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-ground-beneath-her-feet/<blockquote>
<p>“In love one advances by retreating.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Salman Rushdie’s musical opus, <em>The ground beneath her feet</em>, is one of a few select books that I want to slip into my friends’ backpacks, or hide in their bookshelf, or scatter copies under their beds until they must eventually concede. Later they’ll be reading on the train or on the road or under the sea only to find themselves basking in its warmth; <em>The ground beneath her feet</em> is a book that lets you drink bountiful, replenishing slurps from its innards wherever you are.</p>
<p>So much of the book is about <em>belonging</em>, whether or not that’s within the universe of art or society at large. Each character hopes to find where they belong and who they belong with:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We find ground on which to make our stand. In India, that place obsessed by place, belonging-to-your-place, we are mostly given that territory, and that’s that, no arguments, get on with it. But Ormus and Vina and I, we couldn’t accept that, we came loose. Among the great struggles of man—good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.—there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of the journey.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>An excerpt from Rushdie’s autobiography is what led me to it a while ago, and it’s here that he describes the objectives of his work and how this idea of <em>belonging</em> ties into all of his books in one way or another:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There was a novel growing in him, but its exact nature eluded him. It would be a big book, he knew that, ranging widely over space and time. A book of journeys. That felt right. He had dealt, as well as he knew how, with the worlds from which he had come. Now he needed to connect those worlds to the very different world in which he had made his life. He was beginning to see that this, rather than India or Pakistan or politics or magic realism, would be his real subject, the one he would worry away at for the rest of his career: the great question of how the world joins up—not only how the East flows into the West and the West into the East but how the past shapes the present even as the present changes our understanding of the past, and how the imagined world, the location of dreams, art, invention, and, yes, faith, sometimes leaks across the frontier separating it from the “real” place in which human beings mistakenly believe they live.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Salman Rushdie, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/09/17/120917fa_fact_rushdie?currentPage=all">New Yorker</a></p>
Welcome to the club2014-11-23T14:39:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/welcome-to-the-club/<p>Make a note of your favourite writers. Now, read their first names aloud.</p>
<p>Next: scan the book-jackets on your shelf, or the stream of ebooks on your Kindle, and imagine those authors standing right there in the room with you. What do all of these faces share in common? How diverse is this group of friendly strangers?</p>
<p>A couple of years ago these thoughts made me uncomfortable because, aside from the well-known authors such as Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen, nearly all of the names on my shelf were made up of Christophers and Davids, Michaels and Stevens, Johns and Alexanders. My bookshelf revealed that I had joined a gang — I was an unconscious member of the all boys club, and I had been carrying the baton of this poisonous tradition for years without even noticing.</p>
<p>Suddenly my books felt alien and ideologically incestous.</p>
<p>This led me to wonder about the people that aren’t welcome in these clubs, and how they feel about literature — what was their experience whenever they walked into a library or brushed up against a bookcase?</p>
<p>Several years ago, when I first imagined my favourite writers leaping out of my books and into the room, the issue was painfully clear. If I could snap a photo of them this is what they might have looked like:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/image-2.jpg" alt="Cricket" /></p>
<p>Of course, at the time I wasn’t trying to be cruel towards marginalised writers (especially women in this instance) but I soon found that the most terrifying strand of prejudice is entirely unconscious. Ignoring more than fifty percent of all the smart, joyous, and kind words that have ever been published required no effort on my part whatsoever; this type of cruelty was, well, easy.</p>
<p>It’s clear that my shelves deserved better of me, but more importantly all of those ‘other’ writers deserved better of me, too. They required me to be more considerate of the voices that don’t always get heard or, even worse, those that are systematically oppressed thanks to underlying cultural norms that have lasted for hundreds of years.</p>
<blockquote class="blockquote--large--center blockquote--large">
<p>So how do we build communities instead of exclusionary clubs?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>My shelves appear to be much healthier now; there isn’t a single point of origin any more, neither is there a dominant race or gender between the writers. I’ve made sure to design a welcoming set of shelves for people of every imaginable background. Yet I’m left wondering how I can see my own prejudices elsewhere; who am I listening to on Twitter? Which voices am I neglecting? Which sort of people should I choose to work with on a daily basis?</p>
<p>Today the authors on my shelves happily bump into one another whilst their incompatible mantras, philosophies and tales of imaginative fiction all compliment each other in one way or another.</p>
<p>However, my shelves certainly aren’t the model that other bookshelves should aspire to because on quiet, cloudy days I’ll sometimes walk amongst them where they groan under the weight of their neighbours. If I happen to stand in just the right spot, I can begin to hear their mumbles filtered through lips of paper:</p>
<p><em>“Try harder”</em> they mumble in between deep, inky breaths, <em>“try harder…”</em></p>
Tourist2014-11-16T00:34:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/tourist/<p>For a while now I’ve been toying with a story. It’s a quick thought that stretched into an idea which might, maybe, perhaps, possibly turn into a BIG thing. This idea isn’t so much an elaborate story with an intricate, winding plot – nor is it a sequential tale with a standard beginning, middle and end. Instead this idea is simply a person I made up.</p>
<p>Yet at the moment I can’t see this person clearly. I mean, I see her in the distance, I see her as if through a prism or a hazy fog of dreams – that’s to say she’s not even really a character. I don’t know whether she’s a big fan of Grimes, Jose Gonzalez or N.W.A. I haven’t asked whether she has a favourite film or a proclivity towards Expressionism or Modernism, I don’t know where she’s from or what sort of books she likes to read. I don’t even know her name yet.</p>
<p>My favourite characters in films, games or books, are characters with these sorts of questions fulfilled – when I think about these sorts of personal tidbits about a character is when they’ll begin to leap off the page and become something more to me than a dumb string of loosely connected words.</p>
<p>Right now there is one stable image that I’m working with, an image which might flesh out all the characters for me: it’s an environment, a country; vast and subtropical, it criss-crosses Africa between thousands of miles of fields, plains and desert. It’s a winding strip of land that influences millions of lives, both the people in those stranded communities and the natural wildlife that surrounds them.</p>
<p>Of course my response to these feelings was to simply shrug them off. I’m not a scientist; I’ve never studied biology, astrophysics, satellite imagery or the field of genetic mutation. I can’t name more than half a dozen African countries (or first names) without fumbling for my phone and I certainly can’t bear the thought that I’ll likely misrepresent the problems and the people if I continue to write about them.</p>
<p>As I pushed these ideas further away from me, I slowly recanted the myth that <em>writer’s should only write what they know</em>. But the more I thought about this place, the more I enjoyed experimenting with these ideas, and then I wanted to be in southern Mali, consequently I wanted to learn about Arabic and the environmental devastation which at this very moment is combing its way through the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahel">Sahel</a>.</p>
<p>So I realised that the only way for me to visit this place was to write about it. And then it struck me: writing is tourism.</p>
A crowd of sorrows2014-11-02T23:06:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/a-crowd-of-sorrows/<p>I’ve been going back through <a href="http://ftrain.com/">Ftrain</a> thanks to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSL5qVL3Mng">Paul Ford’s talk at XOXO</a>, and there’s a wondrous archive bundled up in this old site of his—years and years of journal entries. <a href="http://www.ftrain.com/archive_ftrainone_920607237.html">This post</a> about his grandfather’s funeral is particularly eye-popping:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Do you mind if I tell you, while I have your ear? All of this, the funeral, the family, the sudden reminder that life ends, it makes me realize how ignorant I am. I'm so sure I'm clever and sophisticated, a smug little agnostic, but put me face forward with death, and I don't know my right from my north. All the rules for social interaction, all the solid clues and codes and handshakes sublimate into the air. Well-written proposals, a steady paycheck, making rent, building the next generation of web sites--these things don't hold up next to death. Death blows them over like a hurricane through a shantytown.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the talk, Paul also mentions a poem by the 13th century Persian poet <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumi">Jelaluddin Rumi</a> called the <em>Guest House</em>. It feels somewhat complimentary to what Paul wrote above:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This being human is a guest house.<br />
Every morning a new arrival.</p>
<p>A joy, a depression, a meanness,<br />
some momentary awareness comes<br />
as an unexpected visitor.</p>
<p>Welcome and entertain them all!<br />
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,<br />
who violently sweep your house<br />
empty of its furniture,<br />
still, treat each guest honorably.<br />
He may be clearing you out<br />
for some new delight.</p>
<p>The dark thought, the shame, the malice<br />
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.</p>
<p>Be grateful for whatever comes<br />
because each has been sent<br />
as a guide from beyond.</p>
</blockquote>
The Great Unbundling2014-10-29T12:42:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-great-unbundling/<p>Somehow I’ve found myself in a room bustling with all the languages of Europe—they’re mixing out in the dusty air around me; Dutch and German, Greek and French, others are arguing in Romanian (or perhaps Italian) whilst they nudge past their elderly counterparts, tourists speaking English. Although they all share their incompatible language with a neighbour, everyone around me can somehow communicate quite easily. Territorial borders and guttural accents cannot stop their obsession for the objects over which they bicker and argue; objects which they’ve come all this way to find; objects which, of course, must be books. Millions of words bundled up in physical, paperback books.</p>
<p>As I pass each group by I realise that I feel more at home in these foreign city bookstores than I do anywhere else in the world. But even at home there are certain features which we might not like, areas of a home we might try to avoid sometimes. So it is in this bookstore where I instinctively avoid the shelves which house crime thrillers and autobiographies—I often skip right past them.</p>
<p>Yet this bookstore is different. Here the books are mushed together—there’s comic books next to sci-fi books, philosophy books next to photographic and architectural books. But there aren’t any labels on the shelves so I can’t discern one category from another.</p>
<p>I find that Italo Calvino’s stories can be found on the ground floor, yet later the rest of his work suddenly reappears on the third.</p>
<p>This lack of organisation is entirely maddening but once I feel the groove of things I tend to move around the shelves differently. Slowing my pace, I focus on the design of the jackets, the blurbs. Here I tend not to pick up the books of famous writers and instead hope to bump into something a little unexpected.</p>
<p>I’ve learnt that an unorganised bookshop is a wonderful thing.</p>
<p>On my way out I find myself rooted before a set of shelves with individual books packaged up and their covers hidden with brown paper tied up with string. On a placard beside the shelf is scribbled a barely legible warning in Dutch, which my phone handily translates for me:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>These are special books. We have hidden the authors’ name, the titles and the book jackets. You must unbundle them to reveal their secrets.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I wonder whether I’ve stumbled into a novel by Robin Sloan. I wonder how many programs I’ll have to write in the next 24hrs. I wonder how many ciphers I’ll have to decode and how many book shops I’ll need to visit in order to uncover the mysteries that are cloaked by these tattered packages. (Oh btw there’s not a chance that Sloan’s 24-hour book shop would be set in the city of San Francisco, not in a million years. In the real world, only the bookish crowds of Amsterdam could possibly support such an establishment.)</p>
<p>Taped to the front of each of them are cut up sentences from inside; this is the signal by which each reader must base all of their book-buying-decisions on.</p>
<p>I skim read the lot of them and unfortunately the most banal sentences have been used, or perhaps most of them just require a lot more context, but then I see this one:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>To be without the slightest subject for a book, the slightest idea of a book, is to find yourself, once again before a book. A vast emptiness. A possible book. Before nothing. Before something like living, naked writing, like something terrible, terrible to overcome.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I couldn’t resist this fascinating blind date. Immediately I picked it up and rushed out of the store. Later, I unbundled the package whilst I sat next to one of the many rivulets which wind in and out of Amsterdam, binding the city together like string.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/canal.jpg" alt="A canal outside the bookshop" /></p>
<p><em>The book was ‘Writing’ by Margueritte Duras – originally this travelogue was posted over on <a href="https://hi.co/moments/6metdt9k">Hi</a>.</em></p>
The great future of video games2014-10-29T11:52:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/anita-sarkeesian-on-video-games/<p>Anita Sarkeesian writing <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/29/opinion/anita-sarkeesian-on-video-games-great-future.html?_r=0">for the NYT</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In 2006, I was drawn back into video games when Nintendo introduced a new system with intuitive motion controls and a quirky name, Wii. Nintendo projected the message that this new console was for everyone. Commercials featuring the tagline “Wii would like to play” showed families and friends of all ages. Nintendo’s console may not have been as technologically splashy as that of its Sony and Microsoft competitors, but it was deliberately designed and marketed to appeal to a wider audience — especially women and girls.</p>
</blockquote>
Medieval desktops2014-10-20T09:02:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/medieval-desktops/<p>Erik Kwakkel on <a href="http://medievalbooks.nl/2014/10/10/medieval-desktops/">medieval deskstops</a> and how they were designed specifically for reading:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>While it is easy to find images of scribes with a desk full of books, it is less common to encounter readers in similar situations. That is to say: there are very few medieval scenes in which someone is reading but not writing – where books are present but pens are not. In part, this has to do with medieval study practices. Readers would usually have a pen nearby even when they were just reading. After all, remarks and critiques needed to be added to the margin at the spur of the moment.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Alongside this post, it looks like there’s whole bunch of <a href="http://medievalbooks.nl/">wonderful articles</a> about reading and writing on the rest of Erik’s website. Adding this one to my ever-expanding RSS feed.</p>
An interview with Italo Calvino2014-10-18T10:17:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/italo-calvino/<p>William Weaver, the translator of many of Calvino’s books, <a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2027/the-art-of-fiction-no-130-italo-calvino">wrote this great piece</a> about his relationship with the author:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Writers do not necessarily cherish their translators, and I occasionally had the feeling that Calvino would have preferred to translate his books himself. In later years he liked to see the galleys of the translation; he would make changes—in his English. The changes were not necessarily corrections of the translation; more often they were revisions, alterations of his own text. Calvino’s English was more theoretical than idiomatic. He also had a way of falling in love with foreign words. With the <em>Mr. Palomar</em> translation he developed a crush on the word <em>feedback</em>. He kept inserting it in the text and I kept tactfully removing it. I couldn’t make it clear to him that, like <em>charisma</em> and <em>input</em> and <em>bottom line</em>, <em>feedback</em>, however beautiful it may sound to the Italian ear, was not appropriate in an English-language literary work.</p>
</blockquote>
Elon Musk interview on Mars colonisation2014-10-17T11:11:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/elon-musk-interview/<p>Ross Andersen, <a href="http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/the-elon-musk-interview-on-mars/">an interview with Elon Musk</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>...a one-way trip to Mars could be a tough sell. It would be fascinating to experience a deep space mission, to see the Earth receding behind you, to feel that you were afloat between worlds, to walk a strange desert under an alien sky. But one of the stars in that sky would be Earth, and one night, you might look up at it, through a telescope. At first, it might look like a blurry sapphire sphere, but as your eyes adjusted, you might be able to make out its oceans and continents. You might begin to long for its mountains and rivers, its flowers and trees, the astonishing array of life forms that roam its rainforests and seas. You might see a network of light sparkling on its dark side, and realise that its nodes were cities, where millions of lives are coming into collision. You might think of your family and friends, and the billions of other people you left behind, any one of which you could one day come to love.</p>
</blockquote>
Writing is thinking2014-10-15T23:57:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/writing-is-thinking/<p>Here’s a neat post from <a href="http://draftwerk.com/">Sally Kerrigan</a>, where she helps writers to make that sometimes terrifying rough draft:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Now you just need to start putting your ideas on paper. Try not to reread until you absolutely have to, preferably on a different day altogether. Just think about what you’re trying to say, and jot the main ideas down. If you’re not sure how to finish a sentence, abandon it halfway through. If you want to write extensively about one particular idea but your mind’s moving too quickly to flesh it all out, paraphrase for now and move on to the next big point.</p>
</blockquote>
Trouble at the Koolaid Point2014-10-10T08:09:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/trouble-at-the-kool/<p>Kathy Sierra, <a href="http://seriouspony.com/trouble-at-the-koolaid-point">Trouble at the koolaid point</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It begins with simple threats. You know, rape, dismemberment, the usual. It’s a good place to start, those threats, because you might simply vanish once those threats include your family. Mission accomplished. But today, many women online — you women who are far braver than I am — you stick around. And now, since you stuck around through the first wave of threats, you are now a much BIGGER problem. Because the Worst Possible Thing has happened: as a result of those attacks, you are NOW serving Victim-Flavored Koolaid.</p>
</blockquote>
Scrambled eggs and serifs2014-10-10T07:29:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/scrambled-eggs-and-serifs/<p>Here’s an interesting post by <a href="http://www.frerejones.com/blog/scrambled-eggs-and-serifs/">Tobias Frere-Jones</a> about naming typefaces and how this process has evolved over the ages:</p>
<figure>
<blockquote><p>Years ago, I asked one of my mentors what he thought was the hardest part of designing a typeface. I was expecting “the cap S” or “the italic lowercase” or something like that. But he answered without hesitation: the name. Finding the name is the hardest part.</p></blockquote>
</figure>
<p>Tobias has only been writing on his blog since April but there’s already a wealth of fantastic articles building up. My favourites include his detective-styled writings on <a href="http://www.frerejones.com/blog/my-kind-of-neighborhood/">typographic neighbourhoods</a> and his <a href="http://www.frerejones.com/blog/cryptic-clever-cute/">typewriter collection</a>, both of which I’d heartily recommend if you like reading about type history.</p>
Here comes everybody2014-10-02T15:13:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/here-comes-everybody/<p><em>“Every webpage is a latent community,”</em> writes <a href="http://www.shirky.com/">Clay Shirky</a> in the most lucid piece of writing about Social Media™ that I’ve ever read. Yet despite its yawning blurb, <em>Here comes everybody</em> is not another book about the horrors of technology. Instead, it examines how the web influences congregations of people in a pragmatic and engaging manner; whether Shirky writes about the political, economic or the social side effects of technology, he always handles these issues with the careful study that they deserve.</p>
<p>In the extract below, Shirky details the many differences between television and the web, describing how our relationship with technology has dramatically influenced the personal relationships that we have with one another:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Television has millions of inbound arrows—viewers watching the screen—and no outbound arrows at all. You can see Oprah; Oprah can’t see you. On the Web, by contrast, the arrows of attention are all potentially reciprocal; anyone can point to anyone else, regardless of geography, infrastructure, or other limits. If Oprah had a weblog, you could link to her, and she could link to you.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As an almost-unrelated side note: I always find it strange when people talk about access to the web. According to a recent study <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/10/02/353288711/why-4-4-billion-people-still-dont-have-internet-access">half the population is offline</a>, so internet access isn’t as democratic or universal as people might think – there are barriers people have to cross in order to gain entry. Or to put it another way, there are ‘arrows’ out there which are entirely unconnected to the others and are pointing in directions we can’t see.</p>
<p>Anyway, it’s particularly enjoyable when Shirky chronicles the significant cultural changes that the web has encouraged as well:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Love has profound effects on small groups of people—it helps explain why we treat our family and friends as we do—but its scope is local and limited. [...] We are used to a world where little things happen for love and big things happen for money. Love motivates people to bake a cake and money motivates people to make an encyclopedia. Now, though, we can do big things for love.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>For the next couple of weeks I’ll be chanting this whenever I stumble over any cynical or snarky moods which happen to sneak up and catch me by surprise. In fact, that last refrain – “<em>we can do big things for love</em>” – sounds like it should be adopted as the mantra of the <a href="http://indiewebcamp.com/">Indie Web</a> movement.</p>
<p>We are the Indie Web and we make big things for love.</p>
What we talk about when we talk about what we talk about when we talk about making2014-09-19T21:15:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-making/<blockquote>
<p>I do not think it is possible to feel empathy for 7 billion people. I know it is not possible to mourn the ~400,000 souls we lose to death every day on this planet earth. In a city like New York, it is not even reasonable to say Hi to everyone you pass on the street. Forget New York, it wasn’t reasonable to say Hi to everyone I passed at XOXO. There are too many humans. Boundaries must be drawn. Who are our friends, who is in the community, who gets to count. The boundaries can be drawn wider or narrower, and with more or less care. But the starting points of those boundaries are necessarily accidents of history, and history is pretty messed up.</p>
</blockquote>
What we see when we read2014-09-19T12:38:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/what-we-see-when-we-read/<p>I’m adding <a href="https://twitter.com/mendelsund">Peter Mendelsund’s</a> book <em>What we see when we read</em> to the small pile of books that I’ll heartily recommend to everyone – it’s a meandering collection of thoughts about what happens during the act of reading. Unlike the title suggests however, the book is not in any way didactic or scientific, instead it overflows with questions and ideas, each illustrated in a way that lets the reader hover over the pages with glee. I’d rather not spoil the fun, since his book is endlessly quotable in every which way, but I do want to share this short extract:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>River</em>, the word, contains within it all rivers, which flow like tributaries into it. And this word contains not only all rivers, but more important all <em>my</em> rivers: every accessible experience of ever river I’ve ever seen, swum in, fished, heard, heard <em>about</em>, felt directly or been affected by in any other manner oblique, secondhand or otherwise. These “rivers” are infinitely tessellating rills and affluents that feed fiction’s ability to spur the imagination. I read the word <em>river</em> and, with or without context, I’ll dip beneath its surface. (I’m a child wading in the moil and suck, my feet cut on a river’s rock-bottom; or the gray river just out the window, now, just to my right, over the trees of the park—spackled with ice. Or—the almost seismic eroticism of a memory from my teens—of the shift of a skirt on a girl in spring, on a quai by an arabesque of a river, in a foreign city...)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A longer extract of the book can be found over on the <a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/08/14/what-we-see-when-we-read/">Paris Review</a>.</p>
Resources for learning how to JavaScript2014-09-10T14:20:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/resources-for-learning-how-to-javascript/<p>In recent weeks I’ve been trying to improve my fledging JavaScript skills, which have <em>always</em> bothered me. Sure, for the longest time I’ve been able to hack away in order to get something to work in the browser but parsing all the quirks and eccentricities of the <abbr title="Document Object Model">DOM</abbr>, <abbr title="Browser Object Model">BOM</abbr> and related <abbr title="Application programming interface">API</abbr>s felt entirely beyond me. So now, a couple of weeks later, I thought it might be a nice idea to round up a collection of resources which I found to be particularly helpful along the way.</p>
<hr />
<h3 id="1:-the-javascript-book" tabindex="-1"><a href="http://javascriptbook.com/">#1: The Javascript Book</a> <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/resources-for-learning-how-to-javascript/#1:-the-javascript-book" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>From the people that brought us the excellent <a href="http://www.htmlandcssbook.com/">HTML and CSS book</a> comes a great resource for folks just starting out with JavaScript. However, more than simply <em>reading</em> this book from cover to cover I’d recommend that anyone that’s dedicated should write out <em>every</em> single line of code from the examples given inside.</p>
<p>I’ve often made the mistake in the past of reading technical books without examining each line of code and ultimately that’s made me a worse programmer in the long run. But now whenever I go through this sort of book I’ll crack open <a href="http://jsbin.com/">JSBin</a> or <a href="http://codepen.io/">Codepen</a> and get the example actually working in my own browser until I move onto another section.</p>
<h3 id="2:-a-dive-into-plain-javascript" tabindex="-1"><a href="http://blog.adtile.me/2014/01/16/a-dive-into-plain-javascript/">#2: A dive into plain JavaScript</a> <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/resources-for-learning-how-to-javascript/#2:-a-dive-into-plain-javascript" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>Next up is an article by <a href="https://twitter.com/viljamis">Viljami Salminen</a> over on the Adtile blog where he offers a comprehensive intro into plain JavaScript, which is especially useful if you’re more familiar with jQuery. The focus of this piece is mostly on the latest additions to the syntax, whilst taking into consideration progressive enhancement too:</p>
<p>While libraries like jQuery help to forget most of the browser inconsistencies, you really become familiar with them once you start using plain JavaScript for everything. To avoid writing JavaScript that’s full of browser hacks and code which only solves browser compatibility issues, I recommend building a progressively enhanced experience using feature detection to only target the more modern browsers.</p>
<h3 id="3:-is-it-time-to-drop-jquery" tabindex="-1"><a href="http://toddmotto.com/is-it-time-to-drop-jquery-essentials-to-learning-javascript-from-a-jquery-background">#3: Is it time to drop jQuery?</a> <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/resources-for-learning-how-to-javascript/#3:-is-it-time-to-drop-jquery" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>Likwise, this piece by <a href="https://twitter.com/toddmotto">Todd Motto</a> is another great introduction to plain JavaScript that takes an interesting look at what jQuery’s doing in the background:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>HTML5 doesn't just mean a few extra HTML elements, if you're putting down on your CV/Resume that you know HTML5 because you've used the new elements, then think again! HTML5 covers such a mass of technology, and also alongside it comes ECMAScript 5, the future of JavaScript. Combining HTML5 APIs, of which most require JavaScript, we need to adopt a more native structure of working as each day jQuery becomes less important, and here's why.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Todd Motto, <a href="http://toddmotto.com/is-it-time-to-drop-jquery-essentials-to-learning-javascript-from-a-jquery-background">toddmotto.com</a></p>
<h3 id="4:-everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-javascript-scope" tabindex="-1"><a href="http://toddmotto.com/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-javascript-scope/">#4: Everything you wanted to know about JavaScript Scope</a> <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/resources-for-learning-how-to-javascript/#4:-everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-javascript-scope" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>Through that great primer on plain JavaScript by Todd I also happened to stumble upon his article which meticulously explains lexical scope. Compared to any other resource out there, I haven’t found a better description, as Todd carefully takes the reader through this unfamiliar concept, step by step:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The JavaScript language has a few concepts of "scope", none of which are straightforward or easy to understand as a new JavaScript developer (and even some experienced JavaScript developers). This post is aimed at those wanting to learn about the many depths of JavaScript after hearing words such as scope, closure, this, namespace, function scope, global scope, lexical scope and public/private scope.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Todd Motto, <a href="http://toddmotto.com/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-javascript-scope/">toddmotto.com</a></p>
<h3 id="5:-help-i'm-stuck-in-an-event-loop!" tabindex="-1"><a href="http://vimeo.com/96425312">#5: Help, I’m stuck in an event loop!</a> <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/resources-for-learning-how-to-javascript/#5:-help-i'm-stuck-in-an-event-loop!" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>This video of a talk by <a href="https://twitter.com/philip_roberts">Philip Roberts</a> at Scotland JS earlier this year piqued my attention because he dives into the inner workings of the JavaScript language. What’s a callback queue? What’s a call stack? How do functions <em>really</em> work in this strange and alien environment? <a href="http://vimeo.com/96425312">Let’s find out!</a></p>
<h3 id="6:-javascript-design-patterns" tabindex="-1"><a href="http://addyosmani.com/resources/essentialjsdesignpatterns/book/">#6: JavaScript Design Patterns</a> <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/resources-for-learning-how-to-javascript/#6:-javascript-design-patterns" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h3>
<p>Finally, I’ve been working my way through this more complicated collection of design patterns as detailed by <a href="https://twitter.com/addyosmani">Addy Osmani</a>. Although it looks a little scary at first, understanding how to organise a lot of JavaScript into a cohesive pattern is vital for maintaining the codebase and working on larger JS applications:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A pattern is a reusable solution that can be applied to commonly occurring problems in software design - in our case - in writing JavaScript web applications. Another way of looking at patterns are as templates for how we solve problems - ones which can be used in quite a few different situations.</p>
<p>Patterns are not an exact solution. It’s important that we remember the role of a pattern is merely to provide us with a solution scheme. Patterns don’t solve all design problems nor do they replace good software designers, however, they do support them. Next we’ll take a look at some of the other advantages patterns have to offer.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr />
<p>Usually I disdain from writing listicles, especially the kind which happen to chant all the things I don’t understand about a particular technology – but sometimes it’s difficult to get to those <em>ah-ha!</em> moments when learning something new, and these books, websites and videos were invaluable in that regard. Hopefully you’ll find these resources as useful as I have.</p>
Practical typography2014-08-18T21:25:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/practical-typography/<p>For one reason or another I had entirely forgotten about Matthew Buttericks’ excellent book <em>Practical typography</em> which he published last year and asked readers to <a href="http://practicaltypography.com/how-to-pay-for-this-book.html">pay whatever they wanted for it afterwards</a>. In his <a href="http://practicaltypography.com/economics-year-one.html">latest update</a> he described it as <em>“an experiment in taking the web seriously as a book-publishing medium”</em> so this weekend I cracked open my browser and tried to catch up on Matthew’s advice on the basics of typesetting.</p>
<p>Finishing a book in this environment feels so much more of an accomplishment than wrapping up a physical book, although it made for interesting reading because it was not written for upcoming graphic designers or art students (like the majority of typographic resources out there), instead this book’s aim had been calibrated specifically towards writers:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’m not here to tell you that typography is more important than the substance of your writing. It’s not. But typography can optimise your writing. Typography can create a better first impression. Typography can reinforce your key points. Typography can extend reader attention. When you ignore typography, you’re ignoring an opportunity to improve the effectiveness of your writing. And isn’t that why you write? To have an effect on readers? To move them, to persuade them, to spur them to action?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Matthew Butterick, <a href="http://practicaltypography.com/introduction.html">Practical Typography</a></p>
<p>Think about that for a second, the idea that typography’s contribution isn’t merely an artistic embellishment, but an optimisation power-up, or even a performance hack. That’s why I was mesmerised with the act of design to begin with; I felt surrounded by sloppy typesetting made up of thin margins or the cheap paper stock, and it was these disabilties that just slowed the reading process to a crawl.</p>
<hr />
<p>It’s impossible to talk about <em>Practical typography</em> without also mentioning the method of publication, a topic which Matthew carefully examines in his <a href="http://practicaltypography.com/economics-year-one.html">follow-up post</a>. It’s here that he offers a few insights about how financially successful the project was, yet sadly the results don’t look particularly compelling for potential writers that want to follow a similar path.</p>
<p>But maybe it didn’t work out financially because of all sorts of issues other than those Matthew gave; perhaps as an audience we’ve devalued writing, or perhaps the problem is that torrential flood of competitors in the other tabs, or maybe the solution is an interface problem and we need additional web standards to ease the transfer of funds between patrons and creators.</p>
<p>What if we still need big publishers for their marketing power, or their ability to help sell advertisements in every corner of the screen? It’s difficult to even playfully consider that publishing’s last, wheezing hope is interactive adverts for diapers and viagra though. Wait – no, I’ve got it! Perhaps it was the lack of a book cover; a quick glance at Matthew’s book makes it hard to differentiate between his work and someone’s wonderfully typeset blog. And what’s up with his book being so <em>bookish</em>, anyway? Maybe readers are only attracted to writing that swarms with elements gyrating and bouncing all over the place as the user scrolls; parallax might be the future of publishing after all. The cynics will just have to get with the times and adjust to the complimentary motion sickness.</p>
<p>What about the word count in all this? Perhaps that sort of writing is untenable after a certain limit, or maybe this type of book is completely incompatible with our experience of browsers. Or maybe it was <a href="https://medium.com/message/the-art-of-anticipation-b716758d7d97">the release schedule</a> that was the problem and the book should have been broken up into smaller chunks and published more frequently, rather than as a single lump.</p>
<p>Of course I’m just goofing around with these ideas because I’m scared of the alternative; that in the future these sorts of books might not be published at all.</p>
<hr />
<p>At least half the excitement of writing a book today isn’t in the writing itself – it’s in all of these alternative disciplines which many writers tend to think of as burdens. It’s the design, the business model, the strange form of marketing that the web makes available to us. It’s even in the formats that we choose to support, for instance Matthew details <a href="http://practicaltypography.com/why-there's-no-e-book-or-pdf.html">why he doesn’t use proprietary formats</a>, such as ebooks and .pdf’s. These are are all typographic, financial and technical burdens, but why should we stop there? Matthew even went so far as to build his own writing tool called <a href="http://mbutterick.github.io/pollen/doc/">Pollen</a> because, he argued, that the <em>“book is a program.”</em></p>
<p>And so maybe those burdens <em>are</em> too much for one writer to undertake on their own but learning about these adjacent fields empowers writers to improve their work considerably. I guess now I’m writing along those patronising lines of “all writers ought to master <abbr title="HAML">HAML</abbr>, Sass and Node before they start their novel and then they should memorise all the quirks of InDesign during their degree in Graphic Communication before moving on to complete a doctorate in the field of X, Y, and Z.”</p>
<p>But then again, if those subsequent tools and complimentary bits of knowledge have the potential to make us better writers then why wouldn’t we experiment with them? I guess writers now have to try and figure out what’s a distraction and what improves their focus – <em>is this programming language going to benefit my characters or the flow of this essay? Is this tool going to give me a new perspective on the publishing industry or will it just be a waste of my valuable time, moments which might have been better spent reading Shakespeare or learning how to illustrate my pop-up book for kids?</em></p>
<p>We’ll only find out if we’re willing to experiment a little.</p>
You’re not welcome here2014-08-12T15:52:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/youre-not-welcome-here/<figure>
<img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/53e3d5f37480b494458b55f7.jpg" alt="A picture of the Brandenburg Gate" />
</figure>
<p>I get the impression that I’m not supposed to be here; the impassable language, the strange food, and my own fumbling terror as I accidentally stroll through the red light district at eight in the morning. These unfamiliar surroundings are beacons warning me away, and sometimes I catch them whisper <em>you are not welcome here</em> through muted Umlauts and Eszetts.</p>
<p>What makes me stutter and wince has no effect whatsoever on even the most nerve-stricken of local friends and so walking around this city makes me feel like I grew up on a distant moon. Conversations begin like this: <em>“wait a minute – you’re telling me that all the stores close on a Sunday but that giant concrete structure, that Cold War era nuclear power station turned dance club is, in fact, open all day and all throughout the night?”</em> Um, okay…I’m starting to hear those whispers again.</p>
<p>But that’s the thing about travelling – in these foreign places you have to make yourself welcome. You have to slide through the airport and navigate bus timetables and crazy southern dialects as if you have all the papers at the ready.</p>
<p>I sometimes try to imagine a bureaucratic document, forged somewhere deep underground in a windowless office, that gives me permission to move into any neighbourhood with a smile. And I think about what those papers might look like whilst I’m struggling to perform even the simplest of daily activities: <em>“this bus goes here and then the U-Bahn leads me where exactly? Sorry, how many backward, geometric Es will that cup of coffee set me back? Oh, you don’t understand me? Here are my papers! Here are my papers!”</em></p>
<p>Those imaginary documents shouldn’t really be necessary though since locals ought to recognise that the only permit that’s required for safe passage is a stranger’s curiosity.</p>
Interface Writing2014-08-12T07:46:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/interface-writing/<p><a href="http://nicolefenton.com/">Nicole Fenton</a> has posted her notes of an excellent talk she gave on how to improve copywriting for interfaces. Sadly though I often tend to neglect lots of this advice, for example the bit where Nicole writes:</p>
<figure>
<blockquote>
<p>Don’t assume you’re the core audience. Most of the time, we’re not designing for ourselves. Think about the universe of people out there. Word choice is extremely important when you’re trying to grow.</p>
<p>Avoid jargon and catchphrases. Cut the bullshit. You don’t have to be hip or clever, but you do have to be nice.</p>
</blockquote>
<figcaption class="cite">Nicole Fenton, <em><a href="http://nicolefenton.com/interface-writing/">Interface Writing</a></em></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This talk carries on from <em><a href="http://nicelysaid.co/">Nicely Said</a></em>, a book which Nicole co-wrote with <a href="http://katekieferlee.com/">Kate Kiefer Lee</a> and where they both cling onto this branch of web design and reveal a host of issues that have bugged me for a long time as a reader. Sometimes these are issues that I couldn’t put into words properly but many of them were copywriting problems that I hadn’t even noticed consciously, problems that I merely felt as I used an interface.</p>
<p><em>Nicely Said</em> is one of those rare books that whilst I was reading it I began wincing with embarrassment as Nicole and Kate revealed how many mistakes I’ve made over the years; it’s just the sort of book I would have killed for a year ago.</p>
Bird by Bird2014-08-11T11:04:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/bird-by-bird/<p>Over the weekend I read this great collection of advice for writers by Anne Lammot called <em>Bird by Bird</em>. The goal of this short little book is to help young writers learn more about the design and publication of fiction but, aside from the self-help format, what really caught my attention is this extract about encouraging other writers to join a community of like-minded folks:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There are always a couple of rank beginners in my classes, and they need people to read their drafts who will rise to the occasion with respect and encouragement. Beginners always try to fit their whole life into ten pages, and they always write blatantly about themselves, even if they make the heroine of their piece a championship racehorse with an alcoholic mother who cries a lot. But beginners are learning to play, and they need encouragement to keep their hands moving across the page.</p>
</blockquote>
Gardens, not graves2014-07-29T17:21:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/gardens-not-graves/<p>Over on <em>A List Apart</em> <a href="http://tanmade.com/">Allen</a> has written <a href="http://alistapart.com/article/gardens-not-graves">an interesting piece</a> about how to make sure that the aging content on our websites isn’t left out to pasture unnecessarily.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>...for years, we’ve neglected the disciplines of stewardship—the invisible and unglamorous work of collecting, restoring, safekeeping, and preservation. Maybe the answer isn’t to post more, to add more and more streams. Let’s return to our existing content and make it more durable and useful.</p>
</blockquote>
A rendezvous of secrets2014-07-28T15:41:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/a-rendezvous-of-secrets/<p>Reading is designed to alleviate our curiosity. We all want to know what’s in our neighbors’ pockets, how they style their hair, how much time they spent on the rusty machine in their garage, or how long and serious their last relationship was. So once in a while, if we're lucky, a good novel might begin to soothe our penchant for mischief.</p>
<p>From this transfer of information between strangers, or from what we might describe as <em>storytelling</em>, we find chance encounters both public and clandestine. These gatherings can easily be found in parks, on open highways or tucked away in snowy cabins, yet the best spots for them are often locations where the author is a little unwelcome.</p>
<p>In order to learn more about this classified material we should first identify the co-conspirators of each story, these so called ‘readers’. It’s here that we’ll notice just how peculiar they are; they believe that friends, enemies and even lovers can be discovered beside the narrative, beside the incandescent glow of a careful story. They’ll often study the tales they bump into as if they were each an experiment and this is just the sort of research which might be conducted under a laboratory’s sterile light or a library’s most private alcove, with each reader performing their own rituals (often consisting of chilled beer in the summer and a hot water bottle under their sheets in the fall). After these strange rituals are over with they can finally kickstart the operation – yet, in order to test these narratives accurately, our aspiring readers ought to gauge the story’s effect on someone else: another reader.</p>
<p>Although, I’m not sure what these readers hope to learn from one another, since most of them are just the sort of person that will judge a room not by its furnishings or its architecture but by the quality of the reading light. However strange these habits might be though, they’re not a characteristic to be noticed solely amongst other Readers because even Non-Readers can act in peculiar ways, too.</p>
<p>For instance whenever children fool around with words and speak with a funny accent, or whenever they write in that charming scrawl, as we listen to them fumble and sing, or hum, or clap their hands whilst alongside them we watch others dash, hop, jump and jiggle, we see even the youngest of them are perfectly aware that these are not just silly games at work, they’re opportunities for great stories to be told.</p>
<p>Loud or quiet, roared or mumbled, these are fragile times in the life of a story but there’s no denying their potential once Non-Readers grok how each tale can be transformed on screen or warmly wrapped up in the pages of a book. <em>‘But where are the very best?’</em> they start to wonder in their late teenage years. <em>‘How are stories made, and where are they all anyway? How are we supposed to uproot the juiciest tales with the most connective threads – how can we read the stories written for us?’</em></p>
<p>To reveal the answers they must find the nearest library to poke, prod and plunder for their own but it’s during these secluded moments that they should expect to get their hands a little dirty. It’s going to take an awful lot of time, money and sheer will power to answer all of those questions which, of course, lead to the Question of Questions:</p>
<p>Which of these stories will delight an audience with a swarm of giggles and which will make them quiver in their seats?</p>
Act in earnest2014-07-12T16:01:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/act-in-earnest/<p>Whilst you’re writing it’s entirely possible to throw everything away and start again if you don’t like how things are working out. If the tone is too harsh or your voice is too light, a quick adjustment can tighten the bolts. Likewise most of those cheesy phrases or clichés are likely to be cast off during the review process and for other ailments, such as awkward rhymes or alliterative phrases that pass you by without notice, a friendly editor is often there to help tidy your thoughts.</p>
<p>At any moment you can shift the momentum of the piece; you might cut out the intro for the end or stretch out the middle parts and futz with the threads that join this organic, clay-like structure until it all begins to make a little more sense.</p>
<p>But with public speaking your words are fixed and ultimately the speaker is naked without that final editing process. Any casual slip up (such as a a string of repetitive words that leak out) are temporarily ingrained onto the minds of those in the audience and I worry that when I get nervous in front of people I’ll begin to repeat adjectives like ‘enormous’, ‘phenomenal’, ‘fantastic’. Yet sometimes I’ve made the error of pointing out those speech impediments as I notice them during the talk.</p>
<p>Of course it’s impossible to stand back after one of these unfortunate mishaps and ask the audience to forget everything they’ve just heard because you don’t like the way it sounds or simply because you let yourself get caught up in the moment. However, I’m starting to think that most mistakes shouldn’t be acknowledged by the speaker during the talk because they break the magic of the performance; these interruptions steal all the momentum out from under your feet and it’s best not to forget that a good audience will shortly forgive you.</p>
<p>Anyway, whilst I was in search for some helpful tools to help me become a better speaker I found <a href="http://speaking.io/">speaking.io</a> which was certainly put to good use in my last talk, but I also took a closer look at other reference material for inspiration, such as self help books (gasp!). This is where I came across Dale Carnegie’s <em>The quick and easy way to effective speaking</em> which contains all sorts of great advice on the topic:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When you speak, you are in a showcase and every facet of your personality is on display. The slightest hint of braggadocio is fatal. On the other hand, modesty inspires confidence and good will. You can be modest without being apologetic. Your audience will like and respect you for suggesting your limitations as long as you show you are determined to do your best.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Although I love great portions of this book there’s an awful amount that ruins it. For instance the constant disregard of female speakers and talking about house wives and using ‘he’ all the time and eurgh! <em>shut up, shut up, shut up</em>. Sadly this is one of those books where you’ll solemnly recall how, regardless of all their insights, the combined history of literature, education and publishing is really just the tragic history of mansplaining things to women.</p>
Chloe2014-07-11T01:24:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/chloe/<p>From a distance across an ocean, across a network, what inspired me about <a href="http://chloeweil.com/">Chloe</a> was her unrelenting curiosity and kindness. Through her writing I began my little hobby of <a href="http://chloeweil.com/blog/i-can-tell-you-how-i-got-from-deep-purple-to-howling-wolf-in-just-25-moves">making playlists</a> every month whilst thinking about owning, as she put it, those <a href="http://chloeweil.com/blog/hipster">representations of me</a> on other services.</p>
<p>We exchanged a few messages between one another but I held back because I didn’t want to sound like a crazy person who was obviously infatuated with her work. However, it was strange when she replied to this gawping praise, imagine a hero of yours looking down from a stage and high-fiving you out of nowhere. Within ten seconds of conversation she would make me feel as if we were both peers or as if I was just as smart, competent and passionate as she was.</p>
<p>I wanted to impress Chloe because thinking that she might be on the other end of a long series of tubes and wires acknowledging my work and pointing me in the right direction, that’s nothing short of inspiring. Her presence encouraged me to write more eloquently, to sharpen my focus, and to try to return the favour. So naturally I believed that at some point in the near future, during a conference somewhere, I’d somehow manage to rustle up the courage and interrupt her – “I LOVE your work!” – though now I think she’d be much more comfortable talking about Nick Cave or <a href="http://chloeweil.com/blog/category:yarn">yarn</a> or <a href="http://indiewebcamp.com/POSSE">POSSE</a> than accept my compliment.</p>
<p>The saddest part is that I cannot say goodbye to Chloe because we never met in person. For that you’ll need to read from her close friends like <a href="http://adactio.com/journal/7030/">Jeremy</a> or <a href="http://waxy.org/2014/07/chloe">Andy</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Chloe Weil tasted words. She was vulnerable to rich emotional experiences in the summertime. She hated her birthday, and she hated surprises. She had a cat named FACE that was famous on Reddit for a day. She helped us listen to songs traveling across the stars.</p>
</blockquote>
Goodbye Erskine2014-06-30T17:43:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/goodbye-erskine/<p>It’s been one hell of a gif-fueled ride, but today is <a href="http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130225130810/glee/images/7/78/Jack_sad.gif">my last</a> at Erskine.</p>
<p>When I joined almost two years ago I thought that Git was an English slang and I didn’t know anything about Sass, JavaScript or <a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7963775/gifs/responsive-design.gif">responsive design</a>. Fresh out of university I hadn’t worked in the field at all, I hadn’t spoken at any conferences or meetups, and I even sometimes tried to hide my work from colleagues. This wasn’t due to inexperience however, it was just one of the many unpleasant side affects of discomfort and shyness. The very thought of sharing <a href="http://robinrendle.com/notes/">my ideas</a> and <a href="http://robinrendle.com/work/">my work</a> in an open, public way used to be terrifying. Of course, with the help of everyone at Erskine I now see that by revealing this process of endless mistake-making is the only way to really improve.</p>
<p>There’s just so much that I learned in Nottingham and it’s hard to write it all down in a single post – not only about the technical side of web design but also how to communicate with clients, how to manage their expectations and how to work peacefully alongside team members from other fields. This small band of designers and developers at Erskine pushed my latent skills in writing, programming and design but they also challenged my tendencies to avoid humiliation at all costs. Most importantly though I discovered a working environment that was supportive and friendly, so it’s kind of impossible to thank everyone enough for their patience as I tried to figure things out.</p>
<p>So what’s next? Well, I have no immediate plans but I’m looking for an exciting place to work right away. I’ll be leaving Nottingham at the end of the week and doing a lot more traveling which might be fun. Although there’s certainly no denying those noxious fears – <em>oh my god, how am I going to pay my rent</em> – but this mixture of terror and unrelenting excitement is often packaged in strange ways.</p>
<p><a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7963775/gifs/lets-ride.gif"><em>To adventures!</em></a></p>
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis2014-06-28T21:51:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-collected-stories-of-lydia-davis/<p>In a short story called ‘To Reiterate’ from <em>The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis</em> the author wonderfully describes her personal experiences of reading, writing and traveling whilst also taking apart dumb quotations and pithy statements in perhaps the best way possible:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Michel Butor says that to travel is to write, because to travel is to read. This can be developed further: To write is to travel, to write is to read, to read is to write, and to read is to travel. But George Steiner says that to translate is also to read, and to translate is to write, as to write is to translate and to read is to translate. So that we may say: To translate is to travel and to travel is to translate. To translate a travel writing, for example, is to read a travel writing, to write a travel writing, to read a writing, to write a writing, and to travel. But if because you are translating you read, and because writing translate, because traveling write, because travelling read, and because translating travel; that is, if to read is to translate, and to translate is to write, to write to travel, to read to travel, to write to read, to read to write, and to travel to translate; then to write is also to write, and to read is also to read, and even more, because when you read you read, but also travel, and because traveling read, therefore read and read; and when reading also write, therefore read; and reading also translate, therefore read; therefore read, read, read and read. The same argument may be made for translating, traveling and writing.</p>
</blockquote>
Do justice and let the skies fall2014-06-19T05:14:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/do-justice-and-let-the-skies-fall/<p>For the longest time I’ve taken the sidelines in most arguments, both online and in daily conversations with strangers. I believed that trying to correct the facts or convince people of my own argument was futile and, in some ways, kind of self righteous. It wasn’t a case of being quietly smug though, I just thought: who needs to hear another white guy shout about civil rights or oppression, institutionalised sexism or the freakishly calm barbarity of a racist slur? There's far too much talking and shouting and, for the most part, I just want to sit on the sidelines and watch everything quietly play out.</p>
<p>At a certain point I only discussed these topics honestly with close friends and over time they pushed me to speak in tones louder than a series of low pitched, quibbling murmurs. What I’m saying is that I used to be extremely passive, but consequently I was being somewhat dismissive and cold, without even noticing it.</p>
<p>But not any more.</p>
<p>I'm done with the collective, gawping sighs at dinner when a stranger announces their shock as to the sexual orientation of a relative, whilst the rest of the party continues to discuss 'the problem' as if it's an ailment.</p>
<p>I'm done with my silence that follows public and brutally sexist tirades. No longer am I going to let those slip by. Likewise, I’m done with the private jokes men share with me about <em>'girls'</em> or those that start a fantastically stupid and cruel conversation with <em>'the thing about women is...'</em></p>
<p>As of today I’m going to loudly denounce those old habits and close encounters that made me clench my teeth and duck out of difficult conversations. Those moments when you remain silent but you know the right thing to do is challenge the scariest, most secure ideas around.</p>
<p>I'm done with my own lack of courage in these situations when I should fight harder for those that need help and kindness the most. I'm done listening to sociopaths casually talk about <em>faggots</em> and <em>bitches</em> as if I'm somehow complicit in their cruelty because we share the same chromosomes.</p>
<p>I'm done with Queens and Kings, established monarchies and their sniffling bureaucrats, as well as the lords and lairds and any other primate that believes their blood right gives them privileges over the rest of us – from now on I’m going to be unbelievably loud and snobbish around those that assume it was their hard work or intelligence that dropped success into their laps (and not the randomly generated doses of privilege that probably befell them instead).</p>
<hr />
<p>I write this because I know there are those of you out there who have also backed out of tough arguments, too. But some conversations ought to be difficult and there are plenty of times during the day when you should raise your voice and say 'this is not ok'.</p>
<p>I’m not encouraging everyone to start fighting against each and every possible moment though, and lord knows we don't need any more critics, but nevertheless we'll always need sharper, more loving criticism.</p>
<p>I also write this because friends don't let friends hold back.</p>
Letters to a Young Contrarian2014-06-18T14:44:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/letters-to-a-young-contrarian/<p>Christopher Hitchens, <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Letters-Young-Contrarian-Christopher-Hitchens/dp/0465030335">Letters to a Young Contrarian</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>How to ward off atrophy and routine, you ask? Well, I can give you a small and perhaps ridiculous example. Every day, the <em>New York Times</em> carries a motto in a box on its front page. “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” it says. It’s been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine that most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure it still irritates me. If I can still exclaim, under my breath, <em>why</em> do they insult me and <em>what</em> do they take me for and what <em>the hell</em> is it supposed to mean unless it’s as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know that I still have a pulse.</p>
<p>You may wish to choose a more rigorous mental workout but I credit this daily infusion of annoyance with extending my life span.</p>
</blockquote>
Madness, Rack, and Honey2014-05-23T22:38:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/poets-are-dead-people-talking-about-being-alive/<p><em>Madness, Rack and Honey</em> is a collection of lectures by the poet <a href="http://www.maryruefle.com/">Mary Ruefle</a> in which she contemplates the various struggles surrounding her art, and gosh darn it if this book isn’t <em>endlessly</em> quotable. I haven’t been able to put it down since as Mary eloquently captures, in so many ways, what it feels like to write about literature, poetry and the arts (especially when you’re forced to talk about all this stuff in a classroom). She writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I get so very tired of having to talk about literature. I didn’t begin writing because I wanted to sit in a room and talk about the construction of subjectivity in Wordsworth and Ashbery; I began writing because I had made friends with the dead: they had written to me, in their books, about life on earth and I wanted to write back and say <em>yes, house, bridge, river, hair, no, maybe, never, forever</em>.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>After reading it I found that my copy was overflowing with notes and scribbles I’d made – every inch of every margin is filled with either !!!!’s or ????’s or <span>woah’s</span>. Every available space in the book is now an underline or a rushed, passionate note. In short: I’m beginning to think again, or perhaps reaffirm, that the mark of a truly great book is all of this excess material that couldn’t possibly make it to print – it’s that strange private/public experience between both reader and writer.</p>
<p>If a wonderful reading experinence mostly consists of all of those marks that you leave on a book before you place it back on its shelf, then this collection of writings by Mary Ruefle can certainly be described as one of my all time favourites. I highly recommend that you grab a copy and start contributing to those margins yourself.</p>
Death by Black Hole2014-05-03T19:09:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/death-by-black-hole/<p>Lately I’ve been reading a fabulous string of novels yet it’s made me feel a little guilty about ignoring the more science-oriented and fact-driven prose out there. So I’ve been making my first tentative steps into the field of physics with a book by Neil deGrasse Tyson called <em><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Death-Black-Hole-Cosmic-Quandaries/dp/0393330168">Death by Black Hole</a></em>. It’s not so much a new body of work but a collection of previous writings, essays and stories about the heat death of the universe, string theory and, of course, what it feels like to get torn apart by the event horizon of a black hole.</p>
<p>The book makes for a nice introduction into a lot of these topics but my favourite section is where Tyson describes how scientists are baffled on a daily basis by the sheer complexity of the universe. It’s here where he describes how <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman">Richard Feynman</a> compared the cosmos to a game of chess:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Richard Feynman, the celebrated twentieth-century physicist, humbly observed that figuring out the laws of physics is like observing a chess game without knowing the rules in advance. Worse yet, he wrote, you don’t get to see each move in sequence. You only get to peek at the game in progress every now and then. With this intellectual handicap, your task is to deduce the rules of chess. You may eventually notice that bishops stay on a single color. That pawns don’t move very fast. Or that a queen is feared by other pieces. [...] Most scientists would agree that the rules of the universe, whatever they may look like in their entirety, are vastly more complex than the rules of chess, and they remain a wellspring of endless bafflement.</p>
</blockquote>
Future of Web Design 20142014-04-14T10:16:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/future-of-web-design-2014/<p>Earlier this week I headed off to the <a href="http://futureofwebdesign.com/london-2014/">Future of Web Design</a> conference in London to give a talk about systems, language and maintainable interface design which was adapted from an essay I wrote back in December called <em><a href="http://robinrendle.com/essays/a-visual-lexicon/">A Visual Lexicon</a></em>. Overall it was a fantastic event with some wonderful talks about JavaScript performance, non-linear storytelling, masking shapes in CSS and so much more. It was certainly a diverse string of interesting talks.</p>
<p>The conference kicked off with a series of workshops on a variety of topics including one that caught my eye: <em>CSS architecture for big front ends</em> with <a href="http://twitter.com/csswizardry">Harry Roberts</a>. Throughout the day he covered all sorts of interesting topics from communicating with other developers to creating well structured and documented systems for the web, during which I made a lot of notes – but these certainly don’t cover everything in the workshop, since these are just the points that grabbed my attention.</p>
<h2 id="1.-designers-don't-always-know-what-developers-need." tabindex="-1">1. Designers don’t always know what developers need. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/future-of-web-design-2014/#1.-designers-don't-always-know-what-developers-need." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>As developers we often require more information from designers than they provide in the initial handover stages. <em>We can only fix this if we start asking better questions</em>, so it might be necessary to ask which systematic values we’ll need to repeat in the future (say, the values that might go into a <a href="https://github.com/ultimate-package/tools.color-palette">global color palette tool</a> or all of the settings of <a href="https://github.com/ultimate-package/tools.font-scale">a typographic scale</a>).</p>
<p>It might be useful to consider which other global variables can be used throughout the system, too. Defaults are especially handy but are frequently left out; link styles and hover states, alternative button modifiers and navigational items might be examples of these styles that slip through the cracks.</p>
<p>In other cases it’s often necessary to ask for mockups of a single component (like every button in the entire codebase) without any contextual styling around it. In complex design systems we might need to print these components out and then break them down with the design team in person.</p>
<p>A lot of designers hand over insufficient design mockups because developers have let this sorry state of affairs carry on for such a long time. <em>We need to fix this.</em></p>
<h2 id="2.-design-systems-ought-to-be-normalised." tabindex="-1">2. Design systems ought to be normalised. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/future-of-web-design-2014/#2.-design-systems-ought-to-be-normalised." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p><em>“Are there are any visual inconsistencies that we can remove entirely?</em>” Developers should question designs that have superfluous styles added to them – do we really need red buttons with square corners <em>and</em> green buttons with rounded ones? We can simplify this system if we start thinking a little bit more pragmatically about how each decision really effects someone’s experience of the website.</p>
<p>In this case <em>“there are some things we shouldn’t build”</em>. Every design decision has a benefit cost involved so if a new component doesn’t dramatically improve usability then we should probably reconsider building it in the first place.</p>
<p>This sort of thinking reminds me of the designers from <a href="https://www.gov.uk/">gov.uk</a> where they discussed <a href="https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2014/02/20/gov-uk-social-sharing-buttons-the-first-10-weeks/">the implications of adding share buttons</a> to the site – they only did so when they had received enough research and data to justify the expense in time and energy.</p>
<h2 id="3.-build-for-systems-not-for-pages." tabindex="-1">3. Build for systems, not for pages. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/future-of-web-design-2014/#3.-build-for-systems-not-for-pages." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Duh, but this still happens all the time in agency life. Mocking up whole pages might be useful for designers and UX folk to get a feel for the system – they absolutely do have some practical purposes, for sure. However, for developers these mockups are next to useless. Instead we need component styles first and then those extra, contextual styles to be applied afterwards, once we’ve set the initial foundations.</p>
<h2 id="4.-developers-should-be-more-confrontational-during-the-handover-process." tabindex="-1">4. Developers should be more confrontational during the handover process. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/future-of-web-design-2014/#4.-developers-should-be-more-confrontational-during-the-handover-process." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>OK, so I guess it’s not about being <em>confrontational</em> per se, but there should be a different sort of balance during the conversations that team members are having right now. This is not about designers/developers being right or wrong though – it’s all about the quality of the end product.</p>
<p><em>“I can make this work – I can build this, no problem. But if we change the design ever so slightly then we won’t have to use all this hacky CSS.”</em></p>
<p>This is why the waterfall workflow process doesn’t work. It suggests that designer’s decisions can’t be influenced by the limits of technology or more programmatic concerns. (On a side note: I’ve heard stories about some people having four hour handover meetings where they go over each design component in excruciating detail and this makes me spit-take so very hard).</p>
<h2 id="5.-"we-haven't-had-a-profound-change-to-front-end-architecture-since-the-early-2000s."" tabindex="-1">5. “We haven’t had a profound change to front-end architecture since the early 2000s.” <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/future-of-web-design-2014/#5.-%22we-haven't-had-a-profound-change-to-front-end-architecture-since-the-early-2000s.%22" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>It looks like we need a new wave of web standards which concentrates on naming these components and changing the current design/dev workflow. I’m not sure if this involves more focus on ‘web standards’ specifically though – I think the challenges seem to come more from poor organisational structure and a lack of clear communication between team members in general.</p>
<h2 id="6.-describing-content-with-semantic-classes-is-completely-redundant." tabindex="-1">6. Describing content with semantic classes is completely redundant. <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/future-of-web-design-2014/#6.-describing-content-with-semantic-classes-is-completely-redundant." aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>In this case the <code>.about-box</code> module sucks as class name, a better name for it would describe the sort of visual changes that these components effect (like <code>.box</code> or <code>.island</code> instead).</p>
<p>In a personal project I recently went <em>crazily</em> overboard with this OOCSS thinking and added modules like <code>.bordered</code> and <code>.font--tisa-bold</code> to the framework, so when the pendulum swings too far in this direction then it can cause just as many problems as not using objects and modules at all.</p>
<h2 id="7.-"the-hardest-thing-about-managing-a-codebase-is-managing-the-people-that-use-it."" tabindex="-1">7. “The hardest thing about managing a codebase is managing the people that use it.” <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/future-of-web-design-2014/#7.-%22the-hardest-thing-about-managing-a-codebase-is-managing-the-people-that-use-it.%22" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>This was the key point that I took away from the day, the idea that designing a maintainable front-end architecture is not really about technology. Creating a manageable codebase is only possible if developers are willing to communicate effectively with one another and challenge the status quo.</p>
Deep breaths in St Paul’s cathedral2014-04-13T14:36:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/deep-breaths-in-st-pauls-cathedral/<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/st-pauls.jpg" alt="St Paul’s cathedral" /></p>
<p>The weeks leading up to a speaking event my nerves will inevitably begin to shake; I bite my lip uncontrollably, my mood swings from ecstatic to horrified and back again, whilst sleep becomes entirely out of the question. Soothing these nerves just before I step onto the stage and find these strangers staring back at me is difficult work, but there is one trick which hasn’t failed me yet. All it requires is for me to picture a single person for whom I want to impress. Not a crowded auditorium filled with all sorts of people with complicated backgrounds and experiences. No, that’s far too scary to think about.</p>
<p>What’s needed is a voice tailored specifically for that individual. Since they’re never present at these talks I imagine the ways in which this phantom can monitor, edit and cull anything that ought be left out. So what if that person was in the room at the time of my talk – would she laugh at this joke? Would she find this topic mean spirited or lacking context in some way? What would she question and what would she want to improve herself? Which sections require explanation, which should be removed entirely? These kinds of questions are sure to bolster confidence and tidy up the clutter of a rhetorical performance.</p>
<p>This person might be fictional, they might be a celebrity mentor that’s inspired you in the past, or it might just be a close friend. Regardless of who this person is it’s important to have them by your side because you’ll be constantly wondering if things are going well; looking out into this crowd of unfamiliar faces is like staring up at the constellations and deciphering the light without a telescope. Hidden amongst this sea of strangers you’ll catch the face which yawns or the one that’s lit up in the dark by their phone. Some might whisper to their friends or even worse; they’ll stare directly at you with the ugliest, meanest frown they can summon.</p>
<p>As I’m walking around St Paul’s and trying to calm my nerves I find that in situations like this I need a friendly barometer of success. A needle which precisely flickers and responds consistently amongst this confusing, undecipherable storm in front of me.</p>
<p>I’ll pretend that she’s in the crowd and I’ll catch my breath and lock it into place. Smiling then becomes second nature and I’ll begin to talk with ease, hoping that maybe this time I can make her laugh.</p>
Dust jackets and snark2014-04-04T22:14:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/dust-jackets-and-snark/<p>Whirls of color and texture flipped by, one after another, up on the projector in front of us. Pitch-perfect typographic settings and illustrative allusions were printed onto these book covers, each striking the balance between describing the story of their contents whilst experimenting and bringing something new to the table. These books supplied patterns of wondrous, electric detail.</p>
<p>We were lucky enough to sneak into this talk by an internationally famous book designer; his work abundantly pronouncing his keen eye and razor-sharp wit. During this short talk it was impossible to ignore or challenge his designs and so all of us, even the hardcore cynics amongst our group, were uncontrollably in awe of him – this designer and storyteller, this <em>sensei</em>, before us.</p>
<p>Half way through he stopped the talk dead in its tracks as a flicker of vile, putrid colors zipped across the screen. It was some of his work for another large publishing house but this stuff was entirely different. You could hear the unmistakable shudder of the thirty or so graphic designers in the room, all collectively thinking: “WTF?”</p>
<p>The books were undeniably ugly; their repulsive, magnetic forces constantly pushed your eyes in the other direction. However the designer argued that the brief for these books was unlike anything else he had ever worked on since his publisher was looking to sell them specifically to younger students. Ultimately the publisher wanted them to buy the cheaper editions and hopefully segment the market into <em>well designed classics</em> and <em>cheap paperbacks</em> for them to be used solely in the classroom.</p>
<p>At the time I was outraged. How <em>dare</em> this designer make ugly things for a bunch of greedy, commercial overlords! Just think of those poor students! Think of all the libraries where those books will awkwardly live, their shelves moaning and mumbling all the while.</p>
<p>With time however I realised that this design was by all accounts a phenomenal success. He had performed the role of a ‘commercial artist’ as he should – it’s right there in the job description. This design had a positive effect on the publisher itself and it neatly segmented this market in two. Yet <em>design</em> in this sense carries a very strange meaning as it challenges our preconceptions of beauty, elegance and success.</p>
<p>Consequently this story is why I’m confused by people ranting on Twitter when a new website/app/film/anything launches and their first reaction is: <em>“this is bad design.”</em> Sadly I often react in this way, too (although I’ve gotten a little better at repressing these knee-jerk reactions). Either way, I think that we need to begin questioning what ‘success’ really means. If good design isn’t about aesthetics, then how can we possibly lash out in either a defensive or challenging manner?</p>
<p>I’d just like to thank those ugly little books for reminding me that any object of a design process is usually more complicated than we might first assume.</p>
Setting type with Sass maps2014-03-16T20:11:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/setting-type-with-sass-maps/<p>Last week I wrote about <a href="http://erskinedesign.com/blog/setting-typographic-scale-with-sass-maps/">an interesting method</a> for setting type by using a brand new feature in <a href="http://blog.sass-lang.com/posts/184094-sass-33-is-released">Sass 3.3</a> called maps. This essentially lets you store lots of data in nested lists which can then be accessed via a mixin or a function. In that post on the Erskine blog I ultimately argued for font-size and line-height settings to be tied to specific fonts in these Sass maps because it’s far easier to read, write and, of course, maintain in the long run.</p>
<p>Yesterday it was great to see that Tim Brown made some <a href="http://codepen.io/timbrown/pen/uqgJj">neat additions</a> to this idea whereby font fallbacks can have settings assigned to them with their own scale. If a font cannot be loaded for whatever reason then the fallback scale will be used and so I think that’s some lovely progressive enhancement right there.</p>
<p>Considering that this is a project that all of us at the Erskine team have contributed to I’ve made <a href="https://github.com/ultimate-package/tools.font-scale">a public repo</a> where we’ll be experimenting with this idea in the future. It’s certainly not finished and the documentation is sure to be found lacking here and there but I think it’s worth sharing these ideas as they are, even if they’re unfinished.</p>
Our favourite typefaces of 20132014-03-12T12:58:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/our-favourite-typefaces-of-2013/<p><em>Typographica</em> 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 traditions now – creeping through the spiral of links, stories and subsquent threads of <em>Typographica</em>, diving into the comments for more information and slowly weaving together the various interconnected strands of its archive. For a class-A type nerd like yours truly, this is a real treat.</p>
<p>The editor and typographer <a href="http://stephencoles.org/">Stephen Coles</a> begins the collection by summarising 2013 in his now familiar and charming way:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This year’s writers are almost as international as the typefaces they cover. More importantly, they represent a variety of perspectives from both sides of font making and using. Type designers, print and web designers, educators, writers, historians — we can all learn from the manifold ways that people from such divergent backgrounds perceive a typeface.</p>
<p>As a reminder, this annual is not a competition in which submitted entries are awarded by an official jury.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>With this in mind, I was honoured to pen a piece on <a href="http://typographica.org/typeface-reviews/brandon-text/">Brandon Text</a>. There’s a lot to love about this typeface and I think my review shows just how interesting it once you stop to take a closer look:</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/brandon-text.png" alt="Brandon text" /></p>
Inside Paragraphs2014-02-16T00:34:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/inside-paragraphs/<p>Last weekend I finally picked up <em><a href="http://insideparagraphs.com/">Inside Paragraphs</a></em>, a book by the illustrator and type designer <a href="http://www.fontbureau.com/people/cyrushighsmith/">Cyrus Highsmith</a>. Essentially the book is a primer into the typesetter’s world, with the succinct writing being wonderfully complemented by the format of the book and the charming illustrative style. This combination makes it effortlessly recommendable for those just entering the field, chiefly since the book doesn’t overcomplicate things by focusing on those familiar, unnecessary distractions common to similar books about typography. Instead, Highsmith describes the core foundations of the topic in how we ought to think about these alphabetic puzzle pieces.</p>
<figure>
<img alt="A picture showing a spread from Inside Parapgraphs" src="https://robinrendle.com/images/inside-paragraphs.jpg" />
</figure>
<p>He begins with the invention of typesetting:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Johann Gutenburg of Mainz, Germany, is usually given credit for inventing movable type around the year 1450. This invention is the basis for the type we use today. Let’s imagine what Gutenberg might have been thinking. [...]Gutenberg considered the counter space, letter space, and line space. Every paragraph, whether written or printed, has these white spaces in it. But they don’t have to be thought of in isolation. Gutenberg’s idea was to attach a certain amount of each kind of space to each letter. With this innovation he created a new kind of space: the glyph space.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I <em>love</em> this description for two reasons. First, Highsmith argues that Gutenberg didn’t just create the manufacturing process for printed typographic matter but designed an alternative typographic dimension with which to <em>see</em> these letters. Second, it makes type designers sound like intergalactic time travellers (which is sort of how I see them anyway).</p>
<p>You can find more information about this book over on its <a href="http://insideparagraphs.com/">lovely micro-site</a>.</p>
The Library at Night2014-01-31T21:56:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-library-at-night/<p>Written by the prolific <a href="http://www.alberto.manguel.com/">Alberto Manguel</a>, <em>The Library at Night</em> examines the history, culture and religious circumstances surrounding the establishment of libraries, both public and private. Throughout what seems like a rather short book in hindsight, the author lovingly takes note of the various ways in which to design and maintain these paperback communities:</p>
<p>We dream of a library of literature created by everyone and belonging to no one, a library that is immortal and will mysteriously lend order to the universe, and yet we know that every orderly choice, every catalogued realm of the imagination, sets up a tyrannical exclusion. Every library is exclusionary, since its selection, however vast, leaves outside its walls endless shelves of writing that, for reasons of taste, knowledge, space and time, have not been included. Every library conjures up its own dark ghost; every ordering sets up, in its wake, a shadow library of absences. Of Aeschylus’ 90 plays only 7 have reached us; of the 80-odd dramas of Euripides only 18...of the 120 plays of Sophocles, a mere 7.</p>
<p>I heard about this wonderful little book via an impromptu gathering held by Contents magazine called <a href="http://contentsmagazine.com/articles/the-library-as-dinner-party/">The Library as Dinner Party</a>, which led many of my Internet <a href="https://twitter.com/robinrendle/status/380387882202320896">book chums</a> to discuss it and share their notes. Though, for one reason or another, I held off on reading it until I stumbled over an old post by <a href="https://twitter.com/aworkinglibrary">Mandy Brown</a> a few weeks ago. <em>The Library at Night</em> propelled her to write about the current state of digital libraries, where she argued that the hardware/software dynamic we see today in ebooks is designed to solve the wrong problem entirely:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wonder, then, if the promise of an ebook isn’t the book but the library. And if, in all our attention to a new device for <em>reading</em>, we’re neglecting methods for <em>shelving</em> [...] The metadata of a book extends beyond the keywords held between its covers to the many hands the text has passed through; it’s not enough just to scan every page. We need to also scan the conversations, the notes left in the margins, the stains from coffee, tea, and drink. We need to eavesdrop on the readers, without whom every book is mute. <em>That</em> is the promise I seek...</p>
</blockquote>
<p>How do we design better shelves? Well, first we must learn about their physical compatriots, and so I can’t think of a better starting point than <em>The Library at Night</em>.</p>
The Solid Form of Language2014-01-05T21:17:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-solid-form-of-language/<p>Robert Bringhurst, <em>The Solid Form of Language</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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 nostalgia, and Sinhalese and Tamil scripts the symbols of two Sri Lankan factions now bitterly opposed. But badges are removable. Where associations such as these are fervently pursued, a script occasionally proves to be more like a brand, or indeed like a prison tattoo, re-engraved on the brain with every letter written and every letter read.</p>
</blockquote>
Quickness and Detours2014-01-01T21:21:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/quickness-and-detours/<p>In <em>Six Memos for the Next Millennium</em> 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 topic of quickness where the author quotes <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Levi">Carlo Levi</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If a straight line is the shortest distance between two fated and inevitable points, digressions will lengthen it; and if these digressions become so complex, so tangled and tortuous, so rapid as to hide their own tracks, who knows—perhaps death may not find us, perhaps time will lose its way, and perhaps we ourselves can remain concealed in our shifting hiding places.</p>
</blockquote>
The Bug2013-12-13T22:27:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-bug/<p>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, <em><a href="https://readmill.com/robinrendle/reads/close-to-the-machine">Close to the Machine</a></em>). This time though it’s <em>The Bug</em>, a story about programming, information theory and obsession.</p>
<p>The protaganist, Ethan Levin, begins to feel his life slipping away from him the more he encounters an elusive glitch in a piece of software. His emotional state spins out of control as he tries to deal with all sorts of problems that must be familiar to anyone working with code and large scale design systems; it’s how Ullman describes these unintended side effects that has caught my attention so firmly.</p>
<p>This small exchange between Ethan and another programmer explains so much of what I’ve experienced lately in working with a team (or should I say, this extract explains the team’s problem with me?). Ethan asks a colleague how a specific piece of code works:</p>
<figure>
<blockquote><p>"You wrote this—what? a couple of months ago? And it's all gone down a well, hasn't it? Gone, vanished, wiped clean from your brain. You don't remember a thing about it. Do you? Do you!"</p>
<p>Thorne gave Ethan his back, but Ethan didn’t need a reply. Of course Thorne didn't remember. Like every programmer, he wrote thousands of lines of code a week, all in the interest of passing ideas through his brain then putting them into the machine, where he never had to think about them again. There was a time when he did know what his code was doing—when he wrote it, when he sat there with his brain exploded and coded like mad to get it all down, all the exploded thoughts, before they blew away.</p>
<p>But as Ethan stood there looking at Thorne’s back, it came to him that the explosion could not run backward. The thoughts were gone, decomposed, passed into code, where they worked, where they ran, but could not be reassembled into human-think.</p></blockquote>
<figcaption class="cite">Ellen Ullman, <cite><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bug-Novel-Ellen-Ullman/dp/1250002494">The Bug</a></cite></figcaption>
</figure>
Empty Libraries2013-12-12T12:05:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/empty-libraries/<p>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 4, yet it’s not the questionable typography or arrangement of its icon that bothers me about this feature though. What troubles me is the sheer audacity of the designer that called it a ‘library’, since opening it reveals nothing at all. But let me just rephrase that if you missed the problem there:</p>
<p><em>My video game library is empty and there’s not a single game inside.</em></p>
<p>I mean, how can my library be empty? I’ve spent countless hours (I dread to estimate) and thousands of pounds with my enormous collection of video games. Even if the developers, the platform or even the company might not remember these legacy platforms, I certainly do.</p>
<p>Through those beige, grey and black boxes of plastic, through codes burnt into compact discs via laserbeam, video games taught us how <a href="http://www.soundshapesgame.com/">music</a> and <a href="http://us.playstation.com/games/pixeljunk-eden-ps3.html">sound effects</a> can enlighten concurrent, streaming <a href="http://vehq.net/wp-content/images/2013/02/jogos-bs-st.jpg">narratives</a>. We <a href="http://cl.ly/13102z1x032t">cowered</a> from monsters that were lurking in the dark. We learnt about <a href="http://www.naughtydog.com/games/uncharted2_among_thieves/">pacing</a> and <a href="http://thatgamecompany.com/games/journey/">color theory</a>. They taught us about <a href="http://cl.ly/230R281z1H3i">balance</a> and <a href="http://www.battlefield.com/uk/battlefield-2">communities</a>, alongside capturing feelings of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout_3">loneliness</a>, <a href="http://cl.ly/1o3x3n2w3z1R">anger</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_IV:_Oblivion">joyous exploration</a>. They revealed how characters should develop, how people should think. Alongside classic stories rife with <a href="http://www.thelastofus.playstation.com/">tragedy</a>, they even gave us <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_64DAOrSMM">project management skills</a>.</p>
<p>As artistically creative and playful this art form naturally is, we also want to remember those <a href="http://youtu.be/JURaoqZgMTQ?t=1m31s">incredibly</a> <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6eZcV1UuUzI">weird</a> and <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-41YUSZ9VAg">unique</a> <a href="http://youtu.be/PVVW41iAu5A">pieces</a> that make us giggle when we return to them in due time. Unfortunately though, with the arrival of a new generation, those memories become ever more difficult to relive.</p>
<p>Games are worth recording simply because of those experiences, now the property of over a billion people that play them on a regular basis. But much like how a physical shelf can shed light on a person’s character, a video game library can reveal so much about how they see the world around them. This is, in and of itself, worth the effort it might take in archiving them all properly.</p>
<hr />
<p>I know that admitting to this sort of unadorned <em>love</em> for an art form is still relatively weird (I kind of hope it’s always strange because I remember them as fondly as the vacations I took as a child, or old films, or wonderful museum exhibits, or the books that drove me wild with excitement). So although it might sound kind of silly, all of that time navigating those villages, towns and galaxies that made up the various pixelated stories in between, stories that I’ve spent so much of my life with, all of it is precious to me – I don’t regret a single moment with any of them.</p>
<p>But for how long will we remember these experiences without a library to guide us through? Trapped in the carcass of legacy formats, buried on top of older games, there’s a good chance these memories will die with those now useless, unreadable objects that came before us.</p>
<p>In all honesty I just can’t bare thinking about the sort of disaster that is. Perhaps we’re spoilt on the web, being able to point to and read <a href="http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html">a document</a> that was written two decades ago and still parse the valuable information inside. I also can’t help but think that games are more complex and therefore short-lived pieces of art which I couldn’t possibly begin to comprehend the technical difficulties of engineering them, even without making them backwards compatible. But then there’s this extract from a post by <a href="http://adactio.com/articles/6546/">Jeremy Keith</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I would like you to evaluate technologies with their long term effect, not just the short term. It’s a weird thing: the best way to be future friendly is to be backwards compatible. We’re kinda lucky that we do use technologies that have stood the test of time, like HTML.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This has bugged me a great deal lately. It saddens me whenever I finish a game, because I realise just how truly finished it really is.</p>
The first floor2013-11-28T22:49:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-first-floor/<p>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 New York. The designer then asks Lubalin how he managed to work in an office filled with such inspiring typographic activity, here came the reply:</p>
<figure>
<p>“I’m going to tell you a secret: on the first floor, there’s a room full of people working, but they only do retail down there, which I don’t show to anyone and which doesn’t appear in any book. We make a lot of money there.”</p>
<p>“On the second floor, we produce publications of a slightly higher level: some adverts, but mostly magazine page spreads, medical pamphlets, and these make reasonable money. I don’t publish this stuff anywhere either.”</p>
<p>“Then there is this room here, where I do the things you see; the Avant Garde alphabet, <em>Eros</em> magazine, etc. These don’t bring in a dime, they just cost money.”</p>
<p>“It’s the first floor that sustains the other two.”</p>
</figure>
<p>Nick Shinn, <a href="http://www.codexmag.com/product/codex-3">Codex: Issue 3</a></p>
<p>I’m bothered by the fact that to make great work Lubalin was forced to have these embarassing sedimentary layers underneath. I’m bothered by his conviction that this is the only way that an agency can be run. I’m bothered by the <em>suggestion</em> that no-one will pay for great work, or that this sort of product cannot be exchanged with a respectable sum in return.</p>
<p>There’s another problem too; it’s heavily implied in the retelling of this story that one cannot gain independence from those first two floors and that we’ll be shackled to them forever, regardless of our profession or the nature of our limited success.</p>
<p>For some reason the description of Lubalin’s office has me drawing parallels with <a href="http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2013/11/healthcare-gov-and-the-gulf-between-planning-and-reality/">this piece</a> by Clay Shirky on how the internal culture of a company has such drastic and unforeseen consequences on their products. And I’m clearly fumbling for connections between the two articles here but <em>burueacracy</em>, whether enforced by government protocols, or the natural strains of the marketplace, is kinda sucky either way.</p>
<p>I wonder what the people on the first two floors thought of people on the third.</p>
Twelve months2013-10-29T20:48:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/twelve-months/<p>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.</p>
<p>Time has zipped by since I joined Erskine a year ago today and I’m now looking back at how I’ve spent my days so far. <em>What have I learned? What can I be doing better?</em></p>
<p>There are so many lessons, screw ups and questions left unanswered in between. So many dumb questions and so much wasted, hot air expelled. Hours of stumbling through documentation at night and wondering if I could ever make just this <em>one damn thing</em> work.</p>
<p>I’ve spent the last twelve months learning, basically. Learning the long hard, stupid way. And I wouldn’t want to have done it anywhere else.</p>
Scrolljacking2013-10-23T18:06:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/scrolljacking/<p>There is only one law of web design: <em>don’t mess with the scroll.</em></p>
<p>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 beneath the 60fps threshold when a user is scrolling around and a script causes <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAqjyCH_LOE">a flood of repaints to the page</a>. This jaggy, unfamiliar feedback as the content moves around on the screen has the effect of disturbing users from navigating the rest of the interface.</p>
<p>However, there appear to be even more websites where this is a <em>feature of the design</em> and not just an unintended byproduct. Take a look at the the <a href="http://www.apple.com/ipad-air/">iPad Air site</a> that launched yesterday, or <a href="https://square.com/cash">Square Cash</a> and scroll around for a few minutes.</p>
<p>These pages might look like slides from shiny keynote presentations but as websites they are the usability equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.</p>
<hr />
<p>Whenever I imagine a designer sat at their desk, coffee in hand, working on one of these websites I think of them as control freaks of the worst kind. I imagine designers thinking things like: <em>They will use this interface the way that I want them to</em>. And yet, even though the sites that come out of this sort of thinking might live on the web, they will never be <em>of the web</em> itself. Hijacking the scroll provides barriers to entry and tiny blockades to the information within; they shine a heavy spotlight on the design rather than the information they are built to support.<br />
But if a designer finds that their users aren’t scrolling as they might hope then there are three potential problems that are probably being overlooked:</p>
<ul>
<li>The content / service is not appealing enough.</li>
<li>The rhetoric isn’t correctly tuned to the audience or the product.</li>
<li>The interface is broken.</li>
</ul>
<p>This is not an inherent problem with the scroll itself since billions of people love to scroll. They scroll all day long on webpages with their phones, with tablets, with desktop computers, both on the web and with offline apps. It’s a design pattern that’s been in use since the very first public introduction of the internet almost 20 years ago and even before it with software on clunky desktop computers.</p>
<p>It’s so natural to scroll that YouTube is overflowing with videos of young children swiping televisions, magazines, and books. Scrolling has replaced the turning of a page as the primary method of pushing on to the next section, the next chapter; it defines our experience with every machine we encounter.</p>
<p>Designers might argue that there are superior alternatives to the scroll, or they might say that there are more interesting and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface">possibly more efficient</a> means of navigating information. What cannot be argued however is that this is an unrecognisable pattern, that people must be treated like mindless herds whilst designers ought to splatter large, condescending arrows across an interface or hijack the scroll completely.</p>
<p>Likewise I think that having a scroll instruction on a website is like having a ‘turn the page’ instruction in a book.</p>
<hr />
<p>Over time I’m beginning to see that web designers have two conflicting objectives when making an interface, regardless of whoever might be the end user.</p>
<p>The first is the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Directive">prime directive</a>; designers need to document existing patterns that are inherent in the medium and stick to these conventions if they can.</p>
<p>This is what <a href="http://www.craigmod.com/">Craig</a> discusses in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7z169AfJvM4">this wonderful talk</a> at O'Reilly. Essentially he describes the ways in which books don’t need a crazy number of tutorials for the user to understand how they work — the constraints of the format encourage designers to experiment in other ways. Yet by latching on to the user’s expectations of what a book is (for more content just keep swiping pages) you can do all sorts of magical things without messing with what might be considered this standardised, baseline user experience that designers get out of the box for free.</p>
<p>The second objective that a designer must struggle with on a daily basis is completely incompatible with the first however. They must also be tirelessly searching for <em>better</em> patterns all the time. Pull to refresh is perhaps the best example of this because it builds on existing user expectations, and it even compliments the scroll itself.</p>
<p>Scrolljacking, as I shall now refer to it both sarcastically and honestly, is a failure of the web designer's first objective; it attacks a standardised pattern and greedily assumes control over the user’s input. Generally this principle in software design is a Bad Idea™, as described by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin">Jef Raskin</a>, grandfather of the Macintosh:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>That a user should not be kept waiting unnecessarily is an obvious and humane design principle. [...] Users should set the pace of interaction.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr />
<figure>
<blockquote lang="en">Scrolling is the default behaviour of the web. If a design conflicts with that then there has to be a pretty damn good reason why.— Robin Rendle (@robinrendle) <a href="https://twitter.com/robinrendle/status/349557342519566337">June 25, 2013</a></blockquote>
</figure>
The daydreams of a book designer2013-10-16T21:09:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-daydreams-of-a-book-designer/<p>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 performed on breathing, heart-beating patients.</p>
<p>Within those dreams she often believed that noses and cheeks and eyebrows could be broken down into a series of geometric constructions. From behind the surgeon’s mask she could see how these features were nothing more than nodes that have explicit relationships with other nodes; like an astronomer that watches for the constellations bloom on a cloudless night, she couldn’t help but draw these things together and make strange assumptions about this network of features.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/type.jpg" alt="type" /></p>
<p>This face is worth talking to, this book is worth reading, that star is worth following. If a single feature was an inch to the left, six centimetres wider, a grade or two lighter, then everything would be different.</p>
<p>It wasn’t daydreaming however that had ruined her potential for a career in medicine. It was the blood. But at least with book design she appreciated how the pages would refuse to scream and pour thick, liquid pints of red from their innards when the construction was wrong.</p>
Purdy2013-10-14T21:25:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/purdy/<p>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, unfortunately, there is only a single photograph left on their desk. You know that the act of photography was expensive, cameras were rare and thus the context, the technological awareness you might have of that place and time, shines a light on its importance.</p>
<p>There was a single photograph or there might be a few albums hidden in a dusty drawer with each of then only skimming through the events in between. But how might that scene be played out today? When there are some of us that have records of each and every moment; breakfast, lunch and dinner, that funny poster you saw tacked up on the wall outside the student’s union, the bleak and sickened look of your girlfriend’s expression as she watches the closing moments of the Red Wedding.</p>
<p>In other words, how do we know what’s important when we have everything beside us? How do we judge the significance of the past with all the parallel and consecutive presents when they’re all available from a single act, a gesture traced on a film of glass?</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/purdy.jpg" alt="purdy" /></p>
<p>The picture above is only a snapshot of the hundreds that I have of Purdy. For me it captures everything about her; the awkwardness, the human-like fumbling in her movements and, of course, her relentless happiness. But maybe one day someone will browse all of the photos that I’ve ever taken and see this one amongst the many millions beside it.</p>
<p>Aside from the metadata punched into its edge there’s no obvious attachment I might have with this moment in time. Likewise no amount of favouriting or upvoting, sharing or starring will ever really express how I feel.</p>
Notes on public speaking2013-09-24T21:01:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/notes-on-public-speaking/<ol>
<li>
<p>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 so cool cat that you’ve had since high school. Keep your biography at the beginning to a sentence or two and move things along as briskly as possible.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Apologising for your talk, your slides, your accent, or even your appearance is the most efficient method of making your audience feel uncomfortable: If you suck at something, or if you feel like your presentation is off, fix it.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Don’t spit your ideas at people and hope that they stick. Tighten up those rhetorical skills and add a word or two to your vocabulary.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Know your slides blindfolded. In the unlikely event that the lights go off then you should still be able to continue your talk as a calm and collected professional that really knows their stuff.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Treat each member of the audience as if they’re a really smart friend.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>That nice collection of quotes you’ve gathered over the years just doesn’t cut it anymore. And please oh please stop reading long reams of text from your slides.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>It’s fine talking about Google Analytics or a particular programming language today, but tomorrow they might not be around any more. What is it about measuring data on the web that’s so important? How is this language different from the others and what can we take from it to improve the general standards of the field? Blow the idea up or shrink it down and see where it takes you.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>You can be weird and clumsy on a stage and people will still like you, they might even begin to fall in love with your quirks over time. But they’ll never forgive you if you’re boring.</p>
</li>
</ol>
Intrinsic Ratios and SVGs2013-09-21T17:08:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/intrinsic-ratios-and-svgs/<p>This week I came across an interesting design problem: how do you make an <abbr title="Scalable vector graphics">SVG</abbr> 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?</p>
<p>For example this could be a strange shape that might be difficult or impossible to emulate with CSS and appears behind content that fluctuates; buttons, long columns of text or titles that break onto multiple lines. We want that background image to stretch horizontally to the width of the viewport but also stretch vertically depending on the content that will likely change inside.</p>
<p>But if you simply attach an <abbr title="Scalable vector graphics">SVG</abbr> background image to an element and remove its dimensions within the file then the image will scale its height and width proportionately – this likely means that the edges of the image will be cut off from view but also means that any extra content we might want to add in the future simply won’t fit.</p>
<p>The fix is easy enough though; open up the <abbr title="Scalable vector graphics">SVG</abbr> in a text editor and add <code>preserveAspectRatio="none"</code> to the <abbr title="Scalable vector graphics">SVG</abbr> element itself whilst also making sure to remove all width and height parameters that might have been automatically set by an app such as Illustrator. I’ve hooked up <a href="http://cdpn.io/JdnCA">a quick example of this on Codepen</a>, and it seems to work relatively well across various browsers. Remember though that this is obviously only suitable for browsers that support <abbr title="Scalable vector graphics">SVG</abbr>, but with <a href="http://modernizr.com/">Modernizr</a> we can test for this and give them appropriate fallbacks.</p>
<p>But what about serving these <abbr title="Scalable vector graphics">SVG</abbr>s <em>only</em> to browsers that can support them? Well…that’s <a href="http://daverupert.com/2013/06/ughck-images/">another issue altogether</a>.</p>
dConstruct2013-09-09T19:59:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/dconstruct-2013/<p>This week the Erskine crew headed down to Brighton for <a href="http://2013.dconstruct.org/">dConstruct</a>, an all day event that navigated the tumultuous and the sometimes frightening theme of communicating with computers. From cyborgs and toasters with personalities to community infrastructure and feeling the deep, moaning rumbles of an organ's infrasound – the talks were a delicate sequence of heart wrenching delight, mechanical whimsy and straight up nerd love.</p>
<p>Watching the fields pass as we caught the train to Brighton, I had no idea what to expect though. Last year I missed the conference due to some work I was doing in Reading and couldn't spare the time. A year later and I now wince at the thought that I might have bumped into my hero of heroes – James Burke – whom, of course, <a href="http://archive.dconstruct.org/2012/admiralshovel">gave an all-or-nothing talk</a> that was predictably mind melting.</p>
<figure>
<img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/brighton-pier.jpg" alt="Brighton pier" />
</figure>
<p>I don’t want to write about this year’s event that much and how it supplanted all of my expectations. There’s been plenty of note taking and talking about it that puts everything into words better than I ever could. But I do want to write a little about <em>seeing</em> however, about perspective and attention, since the event showed me how negligent I’ve been and how much should be within my field of vision.</p>
<hr />
<p>dConstruct tried its damnedest to focus on the fundamentals of computers, design and technology in general, so throughout the day I couldn’t stop thinking about the work of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin">Jef Raskin</a>. The grandfather of the Macintosh and the author of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface">finest book on interface design</a> was likely to pop into my mind from time to time as so many of his writings and the speakers’ thoughts overlapped. But it’s the author’s description of what he called the <em>locus of attention</em> that I’ve been unable to shake for all these years:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I use the term <em>locus</em> because it means <em>place</em> or <em>site</em>. The term <em>focus</em>, which is sometimes used in a similar connection, can be read as a verb; thus, it conveys a misimpression of how attention works. When you are awake and conscious, your locus of attention is a feature or an object in the physical world or an idea about which you are intently and actively thinking.</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>Whereas to <em>focus</em> implies volition, we cannot completely control what our locus of attention will be. If you hear a firecracker unexpectedly exploding behind you, your attention will be drawn to the sound.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This idea has all kinds of ramifications for interface design but I find that it leaks into unexpected fields such as art and music, typographic systems and video games. It’s also a good way to think about what motivates you on a day to day basis - <em>where is your locus of attention and where are your thoughts leading you?</em></p>
<hr />
<p>After I’ve heard a great set of talks or a brilliant seminar, anything that’s mesmerising or important, I tend to crave realignment. In order to reconnect all the various tissues in my brain that have been juggled about and slapped into place by a fantastic speaker I often head out for a walk and catch my breath.</p>
<p>So once the talks were over, I nipped out and sat on the beach by the pier. The sky had cleared over the course of the morning so I was lucky enough to soak up what must have been the final, wheezing gasps of summer, or at least I tried to with all of the pulsating flashes of organ groans, slash fandom, recordings from the dead, patent readings, cat tits and YouTube comments tumbling about in my brain.</p>
<p>I realised that I often laugh and smirk at new technologies without giving them a fair chance, I focus too much on keyboards and mice and touch screens. With each talk I felt a punch to my vision as the speakers challenged the conventions and ideas that I’d grown comfortable with; I shrug off security issues and happily ignore old technology, I don't ask the right questions at the right time, etc.</p>
<p>I felt that dConstruct was a part of a greater discussion about that sort of thinking. Primarily it was about <em>realignment</em>, taking your locus of attention and shaking it about until it made your head ache. There wasn’t any real practical advice - no specific tools or techniques were suggested, but thanks to this the talks were made that much better.</p>
<p>What does all this talk of realignment and focus mean for me? I’m not sure yet, but I'll be sure to keep you posted.</p>
Front-end Maintenance and the Ladder of Abstraction2013-09-04T21:12:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/front-end-maintenance-and-the-ladder-of-abstraction/<p>There’s been various discussions about <a href="http://bradfrostweb.com/blog/post/atomic-web-design/">atomic design</a>, OOCSS and BEM for several years now, but in all the ideas that gravitate around these topics there’s one in particular that hasn’t been fully recognised. As many developers cite <em>efficiency, coding speed and legibility</em> as the driving impetus behind breaking down these large scale design systems into reusable components, I think there’s this other key problem that our community has left floundering on the outskirts.</p>
<p><a href="http://twitter.com/necolas">Nicolas Gallagher</a>, a front-end developer at Twitter, summarised this problem wonderfully however:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Replace “can you build this?” with “can you maintain this without losing your minds?”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Anyone that’s worked on a relatively large front-end system has probably experienced that nauseous feeling whilst navigating all of those partials, files and directories that make up <a href="http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2013/08/02/other-interface-atomic-design-sass/">this interface</a> and so every developer should be able to empathise with this idea of maintenance.</p>
<p>As I’ve flipped between the text editor to the web inspector, from the web inspector and back to the browser again, just to understand how a particular aspect of this system works, I’ve wondered how we can fix these interconnected problems. But it isn’t CSS or Sass specifically that’s slowing us down when we write code, it isn’t what’s driving us mad.</p>
<p>What we struggle with on a day-to-day basis is the complex web of relationships between all of these very simple, yet flawed, dependencies within the CSS. As we switch between the code editor to the web inspector back to the browser and find that, unfortunately, something completely unrelated has been broken on another template, we realise that something here is amiss; the system wasn’t designed to scale.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/image.jpg" alt="image" /></p>
<p>When Nicolas talks about modularity he obviously suggests that websites shouldn’t break in the future. But I think he means something a lot more than that. I think he’s talking about adaptation here; truly responsive systems that can scale over time. And not just visually, where text and boxes flow into containers of varying sizes depending on the dimensions of the browser, but systematically. Layout modules and components should be added to the system without the natural code bloat and psychological issues that tend to follow.</p>
<p>If modularity is the solution to our problems, then <em>maintenance is the key problem</em> that we’re trying to solve here. That’s the goal.</p>
<p>Say a client comes back to you in six months time and asks for a new component to be added to the site. First you have to remember how this site works. You have to remember all of those little hacks you performed to <em>just make it work</em>, as well as the areas where documentation is sure to be found wanting.</p>
<p>Next you have to add code to this system that probably wasn’t designed to be built on top of in the first place. Generally our front-end interfaces are not designed to have different types of forms or new sorts of layout modules slapped onto them in the future.</p>
<p>And these are just the problems we face when working within our own projects, imagine the troubles that a foreign developer faces when scrolling through our work. <em>Hell is someone else’s code</em>, right?</p>
<p>In order to make sure that these websites can grow almost organically then we need to guarantee that they can be maintained. Our code needs to be human readable, and if this is the case then maintenance is primarily about interface design; with developers being the users in this example.</p>
<h2 id="so-how-do-we-make-maintainable-systems" tabindex="-1">So how do we make maintainable systems? <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/front-end-maintenance-and-the-ladder-of-abstraction/#so-how-do-we-make-maintainable-systems" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Well, first we need to think about design a little bit. As I’ve worked at Erskine I’ve learnt a ton about the best sorts of processes and mindsets to get into before undertaking complex projects.</p>
<p>When we begin the design of a website we tend to think of it in steps. We go from a text editor or from a Google Docs file to a sitemap perhaps. Then we begin wireframing – at this stage there is no colour, there’s no fancy typefaces or ‘long-shadows’. Decisions aren’t primarily aesthetic because we know that if we jumped into designing the delicate little buttons and border-radiuses of input fields, before we tackle the vagueness of the whole thing in general, then we’d end up in a world of pain and confusion later. This way we allow for all of the variables that are out there to be systematically dealt with in an orderly fashion and hopefully this lets us confront the needs of many users in the process.</p>
<p>This is the <a href="http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/">ladder of abstraction</a>. A common design process that starts at 3,000 feet up in the air where you can get an overview of the system and then creep your way down into the details.</p>
<p>If we take this design process and focus again on the front-end interface then we realise that <em>we should organise code by its intended effect on the rest of the system</em>. We ought to gather the pieces of code that are global in scope and then zoom in on the specifics. Things like reset.css and normalise.css should be collected together and placed into a separate directory. This way a developer in the future can scan this interface and get that immediate view from 3,000 feet. Then, once we need to fix a bug or add that new module, they can dig in deeper and code without damaging the rest of this complicated system.</p>
<p>Generally, I think that we should spend more time on these sorts of problems. If we start to consider how the developers that follow us will tidy up the things we break, or perhaps even add new components to the site, then perhaps we’ll answer Nicolas’ question after all; in the end we won’t lose our minds.</p>
<hr />
*The image above is this glorious [bird’s eye view](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Atlanta_Koch_map_1892.jpg) of Atlanta in 1892 by Augustus Koch.*
The Comforts of the Siren2013-08-27T07:51:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-comforts-of-the-siren/<p>My hometown was obliterated during the war. Hitler’s Luftwaffe destroyed the pier and the docks, hoping to eradicate the strong Navy presence in and around Plymouth, historically one of the main military ports in the south of England.</p>
<p>In the shrieking darkness of the Blitz whole communities vanished and were replaced by mountains of brick and rubble. In the firestorm that ensued, the market was destroyed as well, but it was shortly rebuilt. Labyrinthine networks of shops and stalls, built out of scraps of metal, cropped up almost organically in its stead. They called it the ‘Tin Pan Alley’.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/tin-pan-alley.jpg" alt="tin-pan-alley" /></p>
<p>The photograph above shows how these people were going about their day as if nothing unusual was happening, as if the Third Reich wasn’t looming over the channel and circling their homes in the dark.</p>
<p>“<em>Fuck Hitler</em>,” I imagine them calling out into this darkness, “<em>we’ll build everything you break.</em>”</p>
<hr />
<p>Without ever having known my grandparents except through second hand accounts and foggy photographs, I have no real connection with all the terrors of that particular moment in time. I don’t know anyone that really understood what it was like to live under these conditions.</p>
<p>There is one string of continuity between those people and myself, however; the sirens that warned them.</p>
<p>Anyone that’s seen documentary footage of this time probably knows what they sound like. That ominous call that comes from everywhere. The sound explodes from the soil and the air and all of the buildings and people around you. It’s an omnipresent, hellish sound.</p>
<p>And yet - every Monday morning after the war they continued to play it. They tested the sirens for future dangers. Today that seems quaint; if an attack was about to occur then I’m just as likely to know about it as soon as the operator of the sirens.</p>
<p>Anyway, the important thing is that, over time, the meaning of the siren changed. It was no longer a symbol of terror, but the opposite. It became a noise that signified that everything was a-ok.</p>
<p>Today I woke up and had breakfast several hundred miles away from my childhood home. I performed all my usual Monday morning routines and sat down for breakfast. But everything felt too quiet. I remembered that this was the time that the sirens would call and I’d often feel, even just briefly, relieved when I could hear them.</p>
<p>I realised that the sound of warning had become the sound of comfort, and today I miss them terribly.</p>
Quarks, Atoms and Molecules2013-07-01T18:46:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/quarks-atoms-and-molecules/<p>In <a href="http://bradfrostweb.com/blog/post/atomic-web-design/">Atomic Design</a> Brad Frost recently argued that front-end development could be improved by modularising particular aspects of design. Instead of coding a form as a component that is reused throughout a website, he suggested breaking it up even further into smaller modules like a placeholder, an input or a text field (which can then be used to create the form by combining these chunks together). This process can be duplicated for navigational items, text with icons, floated objects and pretty much any other sort of front-end module that needs to be re-used.</p>
<p>The theory is that by employing these distinct pieces developers can make the process faster and more efficient because they’re not forced to repeat the same code over and over again. This much appears to be common sense.</p>
<p>Essentially what Brad calls for is <a href="http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/12/12/an-introduction-to-object-oriented-css-oocss/">object oriented design</a> which has been discussed in numerous articles and blog posts in the last few years. But that isn’t what really interested me about the post though, it was the <em>naming convention</em> he chose.</p>
<p>Brad uses biological terms to quickly describe what sections of a design should do; <em>atoms</em> are the main chunks (placeholders, labels etc), whilst <em>molecules</em> are combinations of these standard atoms. The simplicity of it piqued my attention since ultimately what we’re discussing here isn’t just a design process, but also a distinction to be made in an interface.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/code.png" alt="code" /></p>
<p>Whilst reading it I found that as a designer I’m constantly refining two interfaces simultaneously; one for the user when they view the website, the other for developers that have yet to tackle the code in the future, when adjustments or full-scale redesigns must be made. I realised that we throw the role of ‘user’ onto people that navigate the website itself, and yet seem to forget that the code we write will work for developers much in the same way. <em>Developers are users too</em>.</p>
<p>So when we organise and name our files or directories we are inadvertently creating an interface by which developers will have to navigate. Designing conventions for these files, and how they’ll be organised, is fundamental then if we are to ensure active (and fast) development in the future. Atomic design and <abbr title="object oriented css">OOCSS</abbr> seem like the solution to this problem.</p>
<hr />
<p>Over the past few months I’ve been struggling with several aspects of this idea though. In all honesty, I feared that modularising web development in this way might make things too clean and too safe. I worried that the content might get shafted and we’d grow accustomed to designing patterns, whereas sometimes the most interesting aspect of a design is the part that defies pre-established conventions.</p>
<p>In the short talk I gave at <a href="http://secondwednesday.org.uk/">Second Wednesday</a> earlier this year I mentioned these fears for the first time and discussed what can happen when we treat all content as being part of a single system. Sometimes a component requires a design that is never reused, that sort of <a href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/02/08/the-journey-from-writer-to-reader/">one-of-a-kind</a> embellishment, sparking interest or delighting the user in some way. If it was repeated then it might become boring or even worse, repellant. In the end I decided to dive into <abbr title="object oriented css">OOCSS</abbr>, leaving behind many of these fears. Yet some refused to leave and they loomed over my process like a dark cloud.</p>
<h2 id="the-needle-in-the-haystack" tabindex="-1">The needle in the haystack <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/quarks-atoms-and-molecules/#the-needle-in-the-haystack" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Developers are probably quite familiar with <a href="http://sassnotsass.com/">Sass</a> files that contain thousands of lines of code. The legacy <a href="https://github.com/erskinedesign/ed.ultimate_package">ultimate package</a>, a tool that we used as a boilerplate for all of our front-end code at Erskine, also made this unfortunate mistake. The main problem with keeping all of that code in one place and not using <abbr title="block element modifier">BEM</abbr>, <abbr title="object oriented css">OOCSS</abbr> or atomic design is that you’re likely to forget how one section of the code base is dependent on another. This will eventually lead to wasting the developer’s time and possibly slowing the project down considerably.</p>
<p>Finding specific code blocks is also challenging, even with the advanced search features of a great text editor. And of course, these problems become infinitely worse when you must navigate someone else’s project and all of their code. Directories and file names have traditionally been very poorly designed navigational tools.</p>
<h2 id="what-we-need-is-atomic-design-principles-in-our-stylesheets" tabindex="-1">What we need is atomic design principles in our stylesheets <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/quarks-atoms-and-molecules/#what-we-need-is-atomic-design-principles-in-our-stylesheets" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>I really like the <a href="http://inuitcss.com/">Inuit</a> framework and it’s taught me a lot about this modular way of viewing front-end development, but there’s one thing that bugs me. It breaks the system down into three seperate Sass directories: Base, Generic and Objects. I found this naming convention to be confusing because it’s not immediately obvious as to what the relationship is between these directories. <em>Inheritance should be obvious and immediate.</em> We shouldn’t have to think as we move between components, modules, objects, styles or classes. Our focus should be on the design of the website, not the interface between us and the development of it.</p>
<p>I want to describe a different organisational convention that’s largely based on the design of Inuit and the ideas presented in Brad’s blog post. So let me quickly run you through it.</p>
<p>When we begin a new project the first thing we need is a directory to set system-wide styles, so effectively what’s required is a set of <strong>utilities</strong> that make up the basic plumbing of the site. This directory of Sass partials (which will then be included into our main Sass file) is important because we need to define global classes, mixins and styles that can be used anywhere and at anytime; these files are organised by their scope. Our utilities directory might look something like this:</p>
<dl>
<dt>Utilities</dt>
<dd><a href="https://github.com/robinrendle/robinrendle.com/blob/develop/assets/sass/utilities/_reset.scss">_reset.scss</a></dd>
<dd><a href="https://github.com/robinrendle/robinrendle.com/blob/develop/assets/sass/utilities/_normalize.scss">_normalize.scss</a></dd>
<dd><a href="https://github.com/robinrendle/robinrendle.com/blob/develop/assets/sass/utilities/_colors.scss">_colors.scss</a></dd>
<dd><a href="https://github.com/robinrendle/robinrendle.com/blob/develop/assets/sass/utilities/_base-spacing.scss">_base-spacing.scss</a></dd>
</dl>
<p>Next up we ought to define the basic building blocks of the site like paragraphs, tables, images and links. But we should be careful here, we need to make sure that we slowly build up to the complexity that is needed so we don’t step on our toes later. At this stage we should still be thinking globally and not specifically styling for any particular section of the design.</p>
<p>Therefore this next directory should only style the default <abbr title="hyptertext markup language">HTML</abbr> elements. I’ve started calling these components <strong>quarks</strong>; classless objects that, within the files themselves, will contain nothing more than a few elements:</p>
<dl>
<dt>Quarks</dt>
<dd><a href="https://github.com/robinrendle/robinrendle.com/blob/develop/assets/sass/quarks/_lists.scss">_lists.scss</a></dd>
<dd><a href="https://github.com/robinrendle/robinrendle.com/blob/develop/assets/sass/quarks/_paragraphs.scss">_paragraphs.scss</a></dd>
<dd><a href="https://github.com/robinrendle/robinrendle.com/blob/develop/assets/sass/quarks/_tables.scss">_tables.scss</a></dd>
<dd><a href="https://github.com/robinrendle/robinrendle.com/blob/develop/assets/sass/quarks/_links.scss">_links.scss</a></dd>
<dd><a href="https://github.com/robinrendle/robinrendle.com/blob/develop/assets/sass/quarks/_micro.scss">_micros.scss</a></dd>
</dl>
<p>It’s at this point where the system looks like overkill. Why do we need a separate partial for almost every default element that will make up the site? My argument would be that combining all of these smaller pieces together is likely to cause confusion, especially on larger sites. Having a large number of partials is fine so long as they’re easy to find and are organised properly.</p>
<p>Now we need to start thinking about the relationships between these quarks and so we start to introduce aspects of <abbr title="Block element modifier">BEM</abbr> and <abbr title="object oriented css">OOCSS</abbr>. In this system I’ve called these modules <strong>atoms</strong>; universal abstractions such as the <a href="http://www.stubbornella.org/?p=497">media</a> or <a href="http://csswizardry.com/2013/05/the-flag-object/">flag object</a>. For example we might have an object that sets the default styles for buttons – as we then plan for those styles to be extended and built upon:</p>
<dl>
<dt>Atoms</dt>
<dd><a href="https://github.com/robinrendle/robinrendle.com/blob/develop/assets/sass/atoms/_media.scss">_media.scss</a></dd>
<dd><a href="https://github.com/robinrendle/robinrendle.com/blob/develop/assets/sass/atoms/_nav.scss">_nav.scss</a></dd>
<dd><a href="https://github.com/robinrendle/robinrendle.com/blob/develop/assets/sass/atoms/_beautons.scss">_beautons.scss</a></dd>
</dl>
<p>The styles within an atom should almost never be attached to an <abbr title="hypertext markup language">HTML</abbr> element itself; we might not be able to guarantee what the markup will look like in the future so it’s safer to always specify a class instead. In this way, atoms will save us from writing hundreds of lines of code and keeping things relatively abstract. Just as Brad suggested, they’re powerful because they can be combined to form more complicated structures, such as <strong>molecules</strong>.</p>
<p>As I mentioned earlier, sometimes we need one-off structures such as a banner navigational element or a footer that we don’t want to replicate in the future. This is where we can combine sections of code without interfering with any of our global styles:</p>
<dl>
<dt>Molecules</dt>
<dd><a href="https://github.com/robinrendle/robinrendle.com/blob/develop/assets/sass/molecules/_banner.scss">_banner.scss</a></dd>
<dd><a href="https://github.com/robinrendle/robinrendle.com/blob/develop/assets/sass/molecules/_custom-post.scss">_custom-post.scss</a></dd>
<dd><a href="https://github.com/robinrendle/robinrendle.com/blob/develop/assets/sass/molecules/_footer-nav.scss">_footer-nav.scss</a></dd>
</dl>
<p>Molecules allow for the sort of design components that Allen mentioned in <em><a href="http://contentsmagazine.com/articles/made-to-measure/">Made to Measure</a></em> last year:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Design is about establishing a set of relationships between elements. By codifying these relationships as a set of principles instead of a single, stand-alone template, we make it possible for other designers to extend our work (per article) while remaining faithful to its core ideas.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So where atoms and quarks define rigid and well defined rules for the system overall, and utilities provide the outlining structural styles necessary to keep things tidy, it’s the molecules where the design can become more flexible and extend styles out of those central tenets of the system.</p>
<p>These layers act like the multiple dream levels in Inception, each adds another layer of complex behaviour to the website and the subsequent layer is usually dependent on the previous one. Quarks, atoms and molecules break up those monster Sass files I mentioned earlier and make code faster to read and easier to maintain in the long run.</p>
<p>Of course this is not the only way to organise our styles with Sass. They could be based on another kind of taxonomy or categorisation, completely unrelated to biology or chemistry. But as you can see, this is more than just a goofy way to name your files and directories — it implies the kind of relationships between these independent components.</p>
<p>So I updated this little site over the weekend with this design and it held up quite nicely to my expectations of legibility and speed. I no longer feel daunted by the code because it’s broken up into refactored, smaller chunks that I can experiment with. I’m not sure about the pros and cons of using a similar system on a larger scale yet, but I think this sort of convention can be helpful in many ways.</p>
Mistaking the tool for the practice2013-06-05T18:40:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/mistaking-the-tool-for-the-practice/<p>As a developer I’m always on the lookout for the best applications, the fastest machines and the latest, most colourful updates to a product line. But sometimes I find that this can be unhealthy, addictive behaviour and so slowly, over the years, I’ve tried to become more critical of the tools around me. There are two questions that I try to ask as often as possible.</p>
<ol>
<li>How does this [app/feature/machine/code editor etc.] influence my design and development process?</li>
<li>What can I learn from this tool beyond the immediate and fleeting short-term gains?</li>
</ol>
<p>It’s strange to think in this way though. Why should a tool do anything more than what it was designed to? Well, I think these sorts of questions give us ample opportunities to learn more about why we work in the ways that we do. <em>Why these apps or services?</em> What is it about their functions and style that is of interest in this field? What does this combination of techniques say about the rest of the industry collectively?</p>
<p>What tends to bother me is when others fetishise the instruments that they use, for example in an interview when a designer or developer is asked to list their favourite applications. These might be useful in the short term but so little is revealed about their work. It’s here that we let our short term needs for the tool get in the way of the long term benefits of the working process.</p>
<p>There’s a great interview with <a href="http://www.jackcheng.com/">Jack Cheng</a>, the writer and designer of <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/mistaking-the-tool-for-the-practice/jackcheng.com/these-days">These Days</a>, in which he’s asked a similar sort of question. His response reminded me of this conflict between applications and methods when <a href="http://www.oneskinnyj.com/2011/09/pendulums-tea-and-jack-cheng/">he replies</a>:</p>
<figure><blockquote><p>True fulfilment and productivity come from applying your tools with intent. The tools can be lo-fi or hi-fi, analog or digital, but the intent stems first and foremost from a mastery over self. Your tools will not save you.</p></blockquote></figure>
<p>There’s an even bigger risk though; when someone can’t tell the difference between the tool and the overarching practice. This can cause all sorts of problems, but perhaps the most infamous example of this is with the introduction of the horseless carriage in the late 19th century. Before the motorcycle and the automobile were given their respective names, the horseless carriage was used to describe every sort of vehicle available. It described everything from the small to the very large, from the heavy to the very light.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/horseless-carriage.jpg" alt="horseless-carriage" /></p>
<p>Hundreds of years with the horse as the primary mode of transportation had confused people, and rightly so. Over time the meaning of the word ‘horse’ had become synonymous with the word ‘transport’ to such an extent that anything that hauled people about without a horse was, as ridiculous as it might sound, still horse-like. This term manages to capture how much people had mistaken the tool for the process.</p>
<p>However, sometimes those items that we use everyday can be designed to teach us more about their inner workings and why they perform a certain function in a particular way. Last month I was obsessed with <a href="http://inuitcss.com/">Inuit.css</a>, an object oriented CSS framework that sets out to give front-end developers a set of rules which they can then use to scale a design system across a large web project. Essentially it’s a Lego like, ready-made sandbox for teams to work as efficiently as possible. Within this system they’re forced to break down every layout component into <a href="http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2010/06/25/the-media-object-saves-hundreds-of-lines-of-code/">a series of objects</a>. As a developer that constantly gets dazzled with large Sass files and partials hidden all over the place, it was a breath of fresh air to see this sort of stylesheet control panel, dotted with neatly labeled switches and toggles for elegantly controlling the system. The tool was dazzling.</p>
<p>On the surface of it though, this system is not much more than a framework, although a brilliantly designed one for sure. Once you tear it apart and begin messing with all of its constituent parts however, you find so much more than what you might expect. The documentation points you to every corner of the web and to the finest minds in the field. With the numerous inline comments it delivers all of the theory behind the <a href="http://bem.info/method/">BEM</a> and <a href="http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/12/12/an-introduction-to-object-oriented-css-oocss/">OOCSS</a> methodologies. So it’s at this point where I found the tool to be separated from the process of its construction.</p>
<p>In excruciating detail it documents not only how, but also why it was made. This simple tool for developers became a microscope through which it’s possible to analyse a process which has gone mostly unchanged for years.</p>
<hr />
<p>I often wonder how products, whether physical or digital, can act as more than just tools in the long term. I wonder if they can spread out somehow, becoming useful in the instant that you’re using them and yet simultaneously describe the theories behind their assembly.</p>
<p><img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/axe.png" alt="axe" /></p>
<p>Either way, questions about process always lead to more fulfilling answers. They’re more journalistic in nature and, just like we would expect of a great reporter, we want to understand why things happened as much as we want to learn about what has happened. These sorts of questions shed light on why this tool or that particular feature is of use at a given moment in time and why perhaps in the future it might cease to be of use. But process related questions also make us more adaptable to these sorts of problems too.</p>
<p>A tool won’t save us, but the process just might.</p>
The Float2013-05-25T18:32:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-float/<p>In the town where I grew up it was completely natural for everyone to ignore the machines that hunched in the corner at school and at home, never seeing the potential in them to make interesting things or to learn how they really worked.</p>
<p>Computers were nothing more than loud, humming boxes, with wire tentacles that spread out across the room. Occassionally they would spit out a report or a spreadsheet.</p>
<p>Sure enough, I had some experiences of those computers; I was a fat little kid who was just the sort to hide at home on a summer’s day, blowing up aliens and conquering <a href="http://www.ffeternity.fr/screenshot/final-fantasy-7-chocobos-02.jpg">distant, pixelated lands</a>. But that flicker of computational interest that charms so many children at a young age washed over me entirely, and so I also ignored the invisible gathering that was going on between these machines.</p>
<p>Creepy AOL chat rooms and message boards are the only memories I have of the early web, time has filtered out most of the cables and the noise. Somtimes I tend to remember things a whole lot cleaner and more wholesome than they really were, but <em>the web is a year older than I am</em>, and I barely even noticed its development.</p>
<p>I mention this because it’s immensely difficult not to look back and get angry at myself, or at those who had a lot of influence over me as a child. <em>There were so many missed opportunities</em>. How difficult would it have been to have a single class or even a conversation, a simple tutorial on the web, that explained <a href="http://adactio.com/articles/6224/">what it was for</a>? How much time would it have taken someone to show me the video game and then lift the curtain that revealed all the juicy functions and methods that gave it life?</p>
<hr />
<p>It wasn’t until my late teens that I began to notice them, as well as the vast, sprawling network in between. What felt like limited access to the world at the time pushed me to explore those boxes that everyone relied upon so heavily and yet somehow managed to ignore so completely. I wanted to know what it felt like to be <a href="https://readmill.com/robinrendle/reads/close-to-the-machine-technophilia-and-its-discontents/highlights/gqlffw">close to the machine</a>.</p>
<p>So, like the beginning of many Internet love stories, my fondness for computers and the web coincided with my discomfort for my life in the meat space.</p>
<hr />
<p>The first time I read <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321616952/?tag=hydra0b-21&hvadid=9550933389&ref=asc_df_0321616952">Zeldman’s opus</a> something began whizzing around in my mind uncontrollably. I wanted to make a website for my band where I could store <a href="http://f.cl.ly/items/1u0U3I2c1j0X1y3Y3M1u/01%20i%27m%20not%20use%20to%20this.mp3">remixes</a> and fiddle with the innovative publishing models that I caught a passing glimpse of. But it wasn’t until I read about stylesheets however, and the float property specifically, that I truly began to understand the web. I remember talking to Zeldman through the book:</p>
<figure>
<blockquote>
<p>Holy shit! You mean…I can just grab that box and float it over here? Wait, you’re telling me that I can shape everything in this little screen? And everyone else’s screen? I can control everything!?</p>
</blockquote>
</figure>
<h2 id="there-was-power-in-the-float" tabindex="-1">There was power in the float <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/the-float/#there-was-power-in-the-float" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>This small yet important layout hack could dramatically shape anything in the browser. For the first time I felt as if I could make a worthy contribution to a medium with it, as I could pop up the web inspector and push a website around as if its pieces were made of clay. Video games and other computer programs tried their hardest to lock me out of their innards, but with the web all of the tools bubbled on the surface. They were just sitting there, waiting for me to find them.</p>
<hr />
<p>At a young age children are aware that there are doctors, stunt men, astronauts and teachers – they are conscious that these are the professions available to them. But how many are oblivious to the fact that every single word and flash of color on a screen has been placed there by a person? I don’t want to glorify web designers (there is more than enough nonsense spoken about craft) but I want others to be aware that this career that I love so dearly is available to them as well.</p>
<p>And so I ask my fellow web folk this important question: how do we make the tools, and the languages necessary for access, seem less like a hurdle and more like a jungle gym?</p>
<p>Perhaps all of this is more reflective of my own childhood, and the industry is, in fact, very public and accessible. I mean – an overwhelming proportion of us use websites every hour of every day, and so there must be some connection that kids make between the people and the pixels, right?</p>
Counterpunch2013-05-06T18:27:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/counterpunch/<p>Written by Fred Smeijers and published by the Hyphen Press, the second edition of <a href="https://www.typotheque.com/books/counterpunch">Counterpunch</a> is one of the most mesmerising books ever written about the early stages of typography and printing. Originally the author sets out to describe how type was manufactured in the 16th century; how small pieces of steel were filed down, shaped individually by goldsmiths, then used as printing material for well over a century (a process commonly referred to as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punchcutting">punchcutting</a>). But I found a thread in this book that went a little deeper than a discussion about old typographic practices, as wondrous as they might be.</p>
<p>You could say that Smeijers knows a thing or two about type, being the designer behind <a href="https://www.fontfont.com/fonts/quadraat">FF Quadraat</a> and its companion <a href="https://www.fontfont.com/fonts/quadraat-sans">sans serif</a>, as well as the proprietor of the <a href="https://ourtype.com/">OurType</a> font foundry. Some of his less popular, but no less brilliant type design work includes <a href="http://www.teff.nl/fonts/renard/renard.html">Renard</a>, <a href="https://www.typotheque.com/articles/fred_smeijerss_arnhem_typefaces">Arnhem</a> and <a href="https://ourtype.com/#/try/pro-fonts/fresco/">Fresco</a>. But if you’re not familiar with his work it matters very little because Smeijers appears to show his talents through ever porous region of this book. From his elegant and yet to-the-point rhetoric on the topic, to Haultin, his custom typeface in use for this edition only, Smeijers draws a vivid picture of the constraints and technological innovations of the time.</p>
<p>The only thing that might reflect poorly on the design and work behind the book is the topic itself, as few activities can be compared to those of the sixteenth century punch cutter. Smeijers describes how these men hid in the cold and the dark, chiseling away at characters (sometimes as small as 6pt) for months on end. This book asks you to consider the determination of these characters and the sheer strength of will involved under such conditions.</p>
<p>Smeijers doesn’t want to elevate these craftsman however, he wants to understand them. He hopes to clear the fog between the present and the past so that we might better learn from their achievements or failures. However, due to the lack of technical material as well as enough trustworthy primary sources on the art of punchcutting, Smeijers was forced to take a more practical, hands-on approach with his research:</p>
<figure>
<blockquote>
<p>The only thing I could do to find answers was to cut punches myself, to make the experience my own, and then work backwards to what lies behind the practice.</p>
</blockquote>
</figure>
<p>Although the book sets out to describe the act of punchcutting (and the dark art of the counterpunch) it vastly over delivers on this premise. Surely enough, it details those interesting and complex technical specifications and combines enough historical research of the now extinct punchcutter. But I think that the most important element of this book is the way in which it describes humanity’s entanglement with technology. Take these letters for example:</p>
<p class="serif_illustration">Aa</p>
<p>Around the time of Gutenburg’s invention in the fifteenth century, no calligrapher or scribe could make these sorts of letters, as the shapes were simply too complicated and inefficient to write quickly. In many ways, the letters that we see today are <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press">products of the machine</a>. Soon enough, punchcutters stopped referencing the work of calligraphers and began discussing, copying and practicing the examples of other punchcutters. And the most fascinating insight, one that Smeijers returns to constantly throughout his book, is how design is a response to the limitations of people, not technology:</p>
<figure>
<blockquote>
<p>The limits of type are not determined by levels of technique, but depend on the limits of our nervous system: which are the same today as four hundred years ago.</p>
</blockquote>
</figure>
<p>If you’re interested in this sort of thing then I highly recommend James Mosley’s article about <a href="http://typefoundry.blogspot.co.uk/2012_01_01_archive.html">type held in the hand</a>. It’s a fantastic introduction to metal type and the period that follows where Counterpunch leaves off.</p>
Between Shelves2013-03-20T21:05:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/between-shelves/<p>The longer I use <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/between-shelves/www.readmill.com/robinrendle">Readmill</a> the more quickly I find myself falling in love. Aside from its clean interface and the fine typography though, the limited number of features don’t really leave much of an impression at first. It took a considerable amount of time for me to realise however, that Readmill is one of those exceptional apps that is better judged by what it doesn’t do; those missing features (what might be called distractions from reading) are entirely deliberate.</p>
<p>I wanted to write a little bit about this service because I’ve been looking for a trustworthy place to store all of my books and highlights for several years now. Although Readmill describes <a href="https://readmill.com/about">itself</a> primarily as <em>“a unique ebook reader for iPad and iPhone”</em> the part that interests me the most is its web based, library building. And even with the short amount of time that I’ve spent with it, it’s safe to say that my hopes for it to succeed and flourish currently dwarves the other competitive reading apps and services in the same category. So I think it’s worth taking a closer look at trying to understand why it works so well.</p>
<hr />
<p>Right off the bat you’ll probably notice how it deals with social stuff in a peculiar way. Your stream of friends and the books that they’re reading doesn’t interrupt your own reading and scrambles aside when necessary. Likewise, finding books to read within this stream leaves me without the programmatic responses of a Twitter feed or an Instapaper queue. That feeling of trying to catch up and <em>read everything</em> simply doesn’t exist within this service.</p>
<figure class="pull_left">
<img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/readmill.png" alt="Readmill’s iPad app" />
</figure>
<p>Managing that balance between letting the network in and keeping it out of the way for a good read is more difficult than it seems. With my Kindle I feel entirely alone, as if I was reading a physical book, the connections between readers is distant. But the guys at Readmill clearly want you to take your time and enjoy the book you’re currently reading and then, perhaps later, take in a broad overview of your friends’ books that you might find interesting.</p>
<hr />
<p>A few months ago I read Italo Calvino’s novel <em>If on a winter’s night a traveler</em> and it wasn’t until several weeks later that I realised how perfectly it captured my sentiments about this little application. In the extract below, the protagonist of the novel is imagining what reading can become and what sort of untapped potential, in the act of reading itself, is lying dormant. He wonders how it might stir if we were to dream beyond the page or the spine:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Your reading is not solitary: you think of the Other Reader, who, at this same moment, is also opening the book: and there, the novel to be read is superimposed by a possible novel to be lived, the continuation of your story with her, or better still the beginning of a possible story. […] Does this mean that the book has become an instrument, a channel of communication, a rendezvous?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When the author describes these <em>possible stories</em> and this <em>rendezvous</em> between novels, my mind instantly hops around the idea of plugging our books into the web and connecting all of the dots and nodes in between. I dream of how the network splits the books further and further down into segments and searchable components, easily referenced at any given moment. With the ability to trace a person’s thoughts through a text they can become something more than what they were; we can make these books our own. So, as my mind swims through through all of this, I can’t help but dream of all the possible stories that will live online.</p>
<h2 id="but-what-about-the-shelves" tabindex="-1">But what about the shelves? <a class="direct-link" href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/between-shelves/#but-what-about-the-shelves" aria-hidden="true">#</a></h2>
<p>Much as been written about how ebooks should be sold and how they should work; the format, the typography, the surface level of a particular application or its interface. But how do we go about finding the right place to collect all of our long form digital readings? What criteria should we use to judge these new reading services by?</p>
<p>Whenever I see folks hunched over their phones at a bar, or reading their Kindles in coffee shops, these are the questions that I find myself trying to answer. But these questions can be easily summarised: <em>is the platform flexible and trustworthy for the future?</em></p>
<figure class="pull_right">
<img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/book.gif" alt="Pages from an early 16th century book" />
</figure>
<p>At the moment we must secede this point – companies that often conflict with our own desires are truly in control of our digital libraries. Amazon for example, lock their books’ contents to a particular format, and in so doing, limit all of the opportunities between them. <a href="http://alistapart.com/article/publication-standards-part-1-the-fragmented-present">DRM hurts books</a> and the libraries that hold them, it’s as simple as that. But what might be considered a problem of standards, much like in the early days of the web, we find that other problems unfold when we try to envision this library of rendezvous and possible stories:</p>
<ul>
<li>What happens if the <a href="http://blog.fictivekin.com/post/46860403233/the-jokes-on-us">service goes down</a>, disappears, or gets bought outright?</li>
<li>Where can I buy ebooks and how easily can I move them about?</li>
<li>Are the interface’s typographic settings sturdy and confidently designed?</li>
<li>Will the service continue to be refined over its life cycle, or will it linger in obscurity?</li>
<li>How closely should our devices be connected? What benefit is there from this new form of sharing and cross collaboration?</li>
</ul>
<p>It’s interesting to note that all of the questions we ask of software, websites and programmed applications have turned out to be the same ones we ask of the library.</p>
<p>Readmill serves most of these needs beautifully. Take a look at the <a href="https://readmill.com/books/these-days">book detail pages</a> and try not to imagine how the network will continue to break down our books in the future. All books become satellites, tumbling into and around each other whilst the summaries and highlights that we share become available at any time. All of our libraries bubble into one.</p>
<p>This connection between reader, writer and the <em>Other Reader</em> feels closer in this app as to what Calvino imagined back in the 70’s. The social element between these components is a compliment, not a debilitating crutch that gets in between you and the next book you want to read. Unlike other services, Readmill doesn’t try to gamify the user experience either. There are no badges, no tokens or fancy illustrated circles that you win whilst finishing a book or performing a certain action. <em>The reward is the reading.</em></p>
<p>Finally, there’s the ‘Send to Readmill’ button, a button I rarely click, and I adore it for this. I don’t use it as often as I do the ‘Send to Instapaper’ button or the Pocket browser extension. Books sit on the shelf and I go back to them if I get distracted or start another. The same cannot be said for the thousands of unread articles in Instapaper or Readability, hopelessly waiting for me to return. This is because ultimately I want my library to be filled with items that I’ve read and contributed to, a library where sometimes other books tumble in from friendly recommendations. But <a href="http://blog.jackcheng.com/post/25160553986/the-slow-web">there needs to be a slowness</a>, a certain pace to all of this activity.</p>
<p>At the moment Readmill aligns with these ideals nicely. The standards are open, they have an interesting but overlooked <a href="http://developers.readmill.com/">API</a> and the multitude of libraries within are in reach and, when necessary, distant from one another. It pushes ever so slightly in the right direction of that dormant possibility between books and asks us to reconsider the social dominance of the stream. But even more importantly, it persuades us to spend a few quiet moments with the text, the other reader and our libraries.</p>
The Dream Sponge2013-03-10T16:12:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/the-dream-sponge/<p>Several of our closest family friends had gathered at my home. I was about seven or eight at the time and we had met for a party or a celebration of some sort or another but I don’t clearly remember the event itself. Anyway, I recall my excitement about showing the rest of the kids this…well… <em>wonderful something</em> that I had stumbled upon.</p>
<p>Without knowing quite how to describe it, I led this ragtag band of explorers away to a small, windowless spare room that had been forgotten in the turmoil of renovating a block of offices into our home. Magazines, clothes, gym equipment and all sorts of general waste lay heaped up in towers and so naturally we jumped in and tore apart everything that we could get our grubby little hands on.</p>
<p>Though surely the place would have been a nightmare for those afflicted with <abbr title="obsessive compulsive disorder">OCD</abbr>, for us it was a sand box, waste yard and playground all in one. But later, once the smoke had cleared and we all felt thoroughly exhausted, we slowly began to build things out of the refuse.</p>
<p>We imagined all the various kinds of magical abilities that might emerge from these objects when combined together. Each item we found became part of a supernatural uniform that we designed and manufactured for one another; a stringy elastic coil from a broken treadmill became a robotic tail, a chipboard from an old games console became an elaborate piece of some futuristic body armour, whilst desaturated Lego bricks became magical gems that could predict everyone’s movements in the dark.</p>
<p>Yet the most interesting object here was a four poster, queen size bed that had been pushed aside and hidden in a dusty corner for years. It was a prehistoric monster that we courageously dug out of the environment and I remember uncovering those nasty chips and dents that unevenly scarred its flank, wondering about their ghostly origins.</p>
<p>Soon enough we had thrown all of our best ideas at this monster, each time hoping to dream it into something more incredible, something more ethereal than our previous efforts. At first it was a legendary sports car, then a boat gliding across the open seas, then suddenly it would transform into a floating fortress. So this dusty old bed quickly became a template, or a boilerplate of some kind as it allowed us to quickly develop our ideas and share them.</p>
<p>But there were moments when our dreams didn’t quite translate, as we were forced to explain to the group why we had suddenly jumped, or dived, screamed, giggled, or gasped. Aliens would be attacking, Godzilla would have climbed out of the sewers, or we might have all tripped upon a mystical super weapon that only one of us could see.</p>
<p>And so I think this was perhaps the first time we realised that we had to explain to one another what we think, what we want other people to do. Those games revealed the complex, subconscious underworld between the thinking and the acting; between the world of dreams and this world, the one we share. We learnt (with no small amount of frustration and anger) that dream-sharing requires a constant, rigorous discipline from us so that we can limit the differences between what is thought, what is said and what’s then sent into the world.</p>
Modern Typography2013-02-25T16:57:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/modern-typography/<p>Not much needs to be said about <a href="http://www.hyphenpress.co.uk/books/978-0-907259-18-3">this book by Robin Kinross</a>. Once your eyes skim over the words <em>Hyphen Press</em> on the title page then you probably already know what to expect. Indeed, this small English publisher has made their consistently euphoric writings on typographic history almost commonplace (as can be seen in their <a href="http://www.hyphenpress.co.uk/books">back catalogue</a> which holds some of the finest books on typographic history ever printed). But what stood out to me so brightly here is Kinross’ argument about making work public, about focusing on the impact that typographic theory had on its practice.</p>
<p>Since the beginning of the printing trade, the technology and application of certain techniques was seen as a dark art. It took several hundred years until people began to share this information about their work; fears of competition, of losing something that was theirs and the stagnant dialogue between tradesmen began to affect the progress of the community at large. Kinross describes the fascinating emergence of this conversation:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The first move in the long process of the break-down of the printing trade was the splitting of the editorial function away from the workshop and into what would become the publisher’s office. With this division, printing began to be opened up: its secrets started to be articulated.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="centre">
<img src="https://robinrendle.com/images/modern-typography.jpg" alt="Modern Typography" />
</figure>
<p>Kinross takes this idea further and into unexplored territory as he argues that modern typography had only begun with this articulation and blossoming of public consciousness, some 250 years after Gutenberg’s invention:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Printing becomes modern with the spreading of knowledge about itself: with the published description of practices; with the classification of its materials and processes; with coordination of dimensions of materials, enabling their exchange and better conjunction; with the establishment of a record of its history.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Oddly enough, those that shaped and defined the medium chose not to use it. Consequently their dark art lingered in illusive and uninviting circles for so many years. But I can’t help compare this to how web designer’s work in public today; the well-known and the familiar, from <a href="http://www.css-tricks.com/">Chris Coyier</a>, <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/modern-typography/www.ilovetypography.com">John Boardley</a> and <a href="https://robinrendle.com/notes/modern-typography/www.zeldman.com">Jeffrey Zeldman</a>, to the less prolific figures that share tutorials about the benefits of Compass and <abbr title="Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets">SASS</abbr>.</p>
<p>Although similar to print <a href="https://robinrendle.com/essays/call-me-interactivity">in some ways</a>, it seems that the web can only survive in the open – or under a finely tuned lens – and so each of us must record our pokings and proddings because we have a say in the future of a medium like no one else before.</p>
Setting up a default type stylesheet2013-01-19T00:00:00Zhttps://robinrendle.com/notes/setting-up-a-default-type-stylesheet/<p>I’ve noticed that many websites break down poorly as their webfonts fail to load for whatever reason and subsequently fall back onto the system fonts. This is quite common, especially on mobile devices with slow connections and yet it’s strange to see websites that have great typography with vendor fonts, but fall to bits when the slightest problem occurs. The measure might be too wide or the line-height too tall for that particular font; what is required of one typeface can sometimes mean actively fighting the typographic requirements of another. As the x-height of a font might call for a shorter line-height in the paragraph, the fallback may be something like Verdana that requires a considerable amount of space between each line. So how can we handle these two possible environments?</p>
<p>What we really need here is to define two rules for typography in our stylesheets; one for the core fonts, the other for those from a vendor. Thankfully this is relatively easy if we use <a href="http://modernizr.com/">Modernizr</a>.</p>
<p>If you haven’t fooled around with Modernizr before then it’s best to describe it as magic, but technically it’s a feature detection library which will add a class to the <code>html</code> element depending on a browser's features. This might be support for <code>svg</code>, <code>audio</code> or even Javascript itself. On a modern Webkit browser you’ll probably see something like this appended to the <code>html</code> element if Javascript and Modernizr are running properly:</p>
<pre class="language-html"><code class="language-html"><span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"><</span>html</span><br /> <span class="token attr-name">class</span><span class="token attr-value"><span class="token punctuation attr-equals">=</span><span class="token punctuation">"</span>js no-flexbox flexbox-legacy canvas canvastext webgl no-touch geolocation postmessage websqldatabase indexeddb hashchange history draganddrop websockets rgba hsla multiplebgs backgroundsize borderimage borderradius boxshadow textshadow opacity cssanimations csscolumns cssgradients cssreflections csstransforms csstransforms3d csstransitions fontface generatedcontent video audio localstorage sessionstorage webworkers applicationcache svg inlinesvg smil svgclippaths<span class="token punctuation">"</span></span><br /><span class="token punctuation">></span></span><span class="token tag"><span class="token tag"><span class="token punctuation"></</span>html</span><span class="token punctuation">></span></span></code></pre>
<p>These classes are a standard listing of the capabilities of the device but it’s also possible to configure particular tests that we want Modernizr to run. In this case we’ll be using <code>fontface</code> to detect whether the custom webfonts in our stylesheets are running. If a browser does not detect those <code>@fontface</code> rules in our stylesheet then Modernizr will do nothing and the <code>html</code> element won’t have this class added to it.</p>
<p>But now we can begin to separate the two styles like this with Sass:</p>
<pre class="language-scss"><code class="language-scss"><span class="token selector">body </span><span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-size</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 100%<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-family</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> Georgia<span class="token punctuation">,</span> serif<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">line-height</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 1.55<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-weight</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 600<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /><br /> <span class="token selector">.fontface <span class="token parent important">&</span> </span><span class="token punctuation">{</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-size</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 105%<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-family</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> <span class="token string">"Poynter Serif RE"</span><span class="token punctuation">,</span> serif<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">line-height</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 1.65<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token property">font-weight</span><span class="token punctuation">:</span> 400<span class="token punctuation">;</span><br /> <span class="token punctuation">}</span><br /><span class="token punctuation">}</span></code></pre>
<p>And there we have it. Since Modernizr requires us to have the <code>.no-js</code> class appended to the <code>html</code> element before anything happens, it will swap that out as it detects the device’s capabilities. With the code above we’ve separated the default styles that will apply to every child element within. Now we can begin to break down all of our typographic styles into two factions as necessary.</p>
<p>Ideally this would go further, so that as a browser moves through the array of the <code>font-family</code> it would automatically pass through an array of predetermined styles. I’m not so sure if that’s really feasible at the moment, nor am I certain that this will work with mobile browsers with poor connections (since Modernizr might append the <code>fontface</code> class to the element and then fail to fully load the webfonts afterwards). This is a promising start though and since I haven’t read anything elsewhere about this technique I thought I might share it here.</p>