I’m Robin, a designer and writer from the UK. Now I live in San Francisco and I’m currently open to full-time product design roles or freelance design gigs.
Please send all compliments to robinjrendle@gmail.com
About this website
I’ve been working on this website since 2014 and I see it as a public office; notes spread out everywhere in every direction—and whoa! don’t move that—those books and papers over there are super important! Jeez!
Once every couple of years I try to publish A Big Thing over in /essays. This encourages me to work on longer writing projects than I’m typically used to. They often take weeks, months, years of research and thinking and being lazy about them and planning them out and designing them and then just winging it all at the last second and hitting the big green publish button and hoping for the best. Some of them don’t really stand the test of time, some of them are pretty embarrassing, and some of them are the best things I’ve ever done. I’ll let you decide which is which.
Also! This website was built with Eleventy and published via Netlify. You can view all the code over on GitHub if you want to take any inspiration for a website of your own. Oh, and this website doesn’t collect any information from you, there’s no cookies, cus I respect ya and don’t want to grift ya.
Also, also! I tend to change the styles and typography of this website a lot, and sometimes multiple times a week. Let a website be a worry stone, etc.
Typesetting
I adore Söhne, using it everywhere on this here website, but I can’t really say why. I mostly roll my eyes at big chunky neo-grotesques since they’re everywhere and they look mean and mechanical in a way that I find unpleasant. But Söhne has this other thing going on: there’s a warmth to it that’s missing in the other descendants of Akzidenz-Grotesk. The designer of Söhne, Kris Sowersby, even mentions this in his elaborate and lovely design notes:
Akzidenz-Grotesk feels noble, humble and authentic. Nobody knows who designed it. Someone cut its forms, decided on spacing and christened it the most quotidian of names. Its anonymity cements its authenticity. [...] Helvetica, however, nowadays has the whiff of corporate slickness, a digital default that both sustains and saps the spirit.
I hope that the design of this here site pays homage to that history.
— August 2023, San Francisco CA