https://robinrendle.com

Robin RendleThe home of Robin Rendle, a writer and designer from the UK.Robin Rendle About Notes Essays Newsletter Coming home ↗ Mandy Brown wrote this fantastic piece about building a space on the web for yourself: A website is, among other things, a container. The shape of that container both constrains and makes possible what goes within it. This is, I think, one of the primary justifications for having your own website. Not just so you can own your stuff (for some meaning of “ownership,” in a culture in which any billionaire can scrape your work without permission and copyright only protects the rich). Not just so you have a home base among the shifting winds of the various platforms, which rise and fall like brush before the fire. Not just so you can avoid setting up camp in a Nazi bar. But also so that you can shape the work—so that you can give shape to it, and in that shaping make possible work that couldn’t arise elsewhere. Yes, yes, yes! Websites have always been tiny mutinies, perfectly designed for rebellion! In these spaces we design the rules, we set the agenda. But perhaps what makes Mandy’s post so interesting to me is when she writes about difficulty. Often we want websites to be easy; we compare different content management systems and publishing workflows, we talk about how—with just a click!—a website can be made. Instead, Mandy argues that building a personal space on the web should be difficult and how there’s something important to learn from that physical work: ...more often than not, I find that what I need is some friction, some labor, the effort to work things out. Efficiency is an anti-goal; it is at odds with the work, which requires resistance and tension in order to come into being. I love this, of course, and the more I think about this it’s really how I’ve split my website between Notes and Essays. Notes are super easy to post and I’ve setup a macOS Shortcut that generates a markdown file with all the metadata for me so I can scribble ideas like a notepad. With Essays I’ve made them intentionally difficult because the difficulty is the point. I write all the HTML, CSS, and scripts by hand. And over the years I’ve found that this labor forces a project to slow way down, and for me to become much more considerate and careful than I otherwise would. Only then can I think deeply about details that I might skim over. Efficiency be damned. ↳ September 28, 2024 Hire HTML and CSS people ↗ Every problem at every company I’ve ever worked at eventually boils down to “please dear god can we just hire people who know how to write HTML and CSS.” This UX is awful? That UI looks old? Accessibility busted? Performance bad? Design team can’t ship stuff? Customers annoyed by tons of bugs? Everything takes too long to build? No time for small usability improvements? Hire. HTML. And. CSS. People. ↳ September 21, 2024 Every webpage deserves to be a place ↗ Matt Webb just added a new feature to his website called cursor party: If you’ve visited my actual website, rather than reading by email or whatever, such as reading this very post, you may notice somebody else’s cursor pass by as you’re reading. [...] Mostly my blog is pretty quiet. I think of it like one of those always empty tiny galleries with like maximum three paintings that you get in some neighbourhoods (there’s one around the corner from where I live now in Peckham). And if you’re in there - which is rare - and somebody else happens to step in at the exact same moment - which is super rare - then you’re like, huh, that’s nice, and you feel the cosy glow of co-presence and finish looking at the pictures then wander out again. Cosy glow websites! Co-presence! A less lonely web! ↳ September 16, 2024 Notes on font licensing ↗ In the year of our lord 2024 it feels so very antiquated that there’s separate licenses for web and desktop fonts. Every project I work on requires both font formats and I know there’s business reasons why a type foundry might make those separate purchases but as a designer it’s a deeply frustrating experience to just...use the fonts and make cool things with them. If a type foundry wants to keep desktop and web fonts as separate purchases instead of bundling them together then they really need to offer easily downloadable trial fonts. In fact, perhaps the main reason that I use so much of David Jonathan Ross’s work is that he has three buttons next to his fonts: Try, Test, Buy. Won’t trial fonts just open the gates to piracy though? Well, earlier this month Rutherford Craze gave an update on his trial fonts: This weekend it’ll be one year since we started providing full, non-subset trial fonts. At the time I wasn’t entirely confident it’d work — but with tangible benefits and only hypothetical risks, I had to at least give it a shot. Reader, it has been a resounding success. It’s good for foundries because it’s good for customers and designers. (I can’t count the number of times I’ve bought a font and realized, with horror, that actually it’s the wrong weight or style for my needs and now I can’t really afford to buy the right one.) Trial fonts are a balm against anxiety, helping us make decisions as designers, and help us trust the purchase is the right one. And so now whenever I see that a foundry doesn’t offer test fonts, I tend to avoid buying them, just in case. ↳ September 1, 2024 No one’s ready for this ↗ Sarah Jeong: We briefly lived in an era in which the photograph was a shortcut to reality, to knowing things, to having a smoking gun. It was an extraordinarily useful tool for navigating the world around us. We are now leaping headfirst into a future in which reality is simply less knowable. The lost Library of Alexandria could have fit onto the microSD card in my Nintendo Switch, and yet the cutting edge of technology is a handheld telephone that spews lies as a fun little bonus feature. We are fucked. My views change on AI stuff all the time and so I’m just noting them here for the future—but!—I can’t think of any creative or even barely useful applications of generating things inside images besides "I can lie to you about motorcycle crashes and natural disasters faster than I can think.” (Unlike Apple Intelligence, where you draw a circle and then a lame image is generated for you—I would certainly judge anyone who used it for anything outside of a placeholder image to be later replaced—but that sort of image generation doesn’t feel immoral to me.) Removing things from images I’m weirdly ok with, too! I use that in Lightroom all the time and it doesn’t feel like “lying” to me. Removing a traffic cone from a road to make the image more appealing is morally fine I guess because it feels like you’re focusing on the important details. Also, I don’t feel duped when I see that a photographer has brightened, lightened, desaturated, added a vignette or removed small details from their photographs. It gives me the same feeling as when I see the before/after edits on a chunk of writing. But this stuff right here—adding things that never happened to a picture—that’s immoral because confusion and deception is the point of this product. There are only shady applications for it. Looking at a lot of the examples here I can’t tell what’s real without inspecting them—the crashed motorcycle has a bicycle tire for example but man I would never look this closely in most situations. So right now I think this stuff should be straight up illegal. ↳ August 30, 2024 A message in binary ↗ Nolen Royalty writes about his wondrous One Million Checkboxes project, and how something very peculiar happened: A few days into making One Million Checkboxes I thought I’d been hacked. What was that doing in my database? A few hours later I was tearing up, proud of some brilliant teens. [...] I hadn’t been hacked. Someone was writing me a message in binary. Nolen also gave a fantastic talk at XOXO last week where he told a part of this story and I think it was one of the most inspiring talks I’ve seen in a while. It took every ounce of effort in me not to run back to my hotel room and hurriedly build something out of pure excitement. ↳ August 30, 2024 Departure Mono ↗ Here’s a lovely monospaced font by Helena Zhang that’s worth checking out. It has just the right amount of charm and charisma, but it’s still readable at small sizes. I’m downloading this thing immediately. Also: Departure Mono is a monospaced pixel font inspired by the constraints of early command-line and graphical user interfaces, the tiny pixel fonts of the late 90s/early 00s, and sci-fi concepts from film and television. The ever-so-excellent website is by Tobias Fried and there are just so many details and animations and lovely bits of UI here. Right up to the end of the website where things usually trail off. Extremely. Very. Good. ↳ August 29, 2024 Moonbound ↗ Last night I finished Moonbound, Robin Sloan’s latest novel, and now I am deeply, thoroughly annoyed that there aren’t seven of them lined up already for me to blitz through. I demand EarthBound, SeaBound, SpaceBound! This is the kind of novel series where you want to step inside and never let go, spending whole weeks and months in the Bound-verse, turning over every rock, reading every new book back to back without pause. That is to say: Moonbound is fantastic. Here’s some quick and random notes about everything that I loved (without spoilers!): I adored the villains. Lots of bad guys are genuinely boring to me in movies and novels and so I prefer when I agree with the villain and can understand their motivations. Here, the many villains of Moonbound are not plain-ol’-boring-straight-up-evil-dudes—instead, they’re scary and cool and you want to sit down with them and ask them questions and buy them a beer to understand more about how they see the world but also do all of that with them safely behind an impenetrable wall of glass. There’s a twist that made me genuinely gasp! I did not expect something in a novel before it happened! This is possible to do! I am alive! Literature happened to me! It was a moment that was totally unexpected and it built up to the reveal perfectly in that sort of bubbly, novel-feeling way where unexpected things still feel possible at every turn. There’s a place in the novel that I won’t spoil anything about besides the name: it’s called the Eigengrau. And, quite frankly, it’s one of my favorite fictive locations since Hannu Rajaniemi’s Summerland. As soon as I stepped foot in the Eigengrau I was hooked. Sloan’s mix of magic and technology, sci-fi and fantasy, is fascinating and a bit scary in a Jeff VanderMeer way—with vague, difficult-to-grasp horrors—but also technology that’s genuinely hopeful in there, too. In fact, Dan Bouk mentioned this in his newsletter a while back: “The world gives us so many reasons to be jaded and suspicious---so many very good reasons!---and yet Robin insists that good things are still possible” Moonbound insists on this, too. ↳ August 15, 2024 Ideas are vulnerable ↗ There’s this scene in Halt and Catch Fire that I think about all the time. Lee Pace (played by me) walks into an empty office with his business pal and smiles at all the emptiness. “Look,” Lee says, pointing across the room towards a chalkboard that has nothing written on it. “It’s perfect.” It’s perfect because, for now, there’s no broken code, no investors, no pain or animosity or drama between cofounders. There’s no money and middle management or stock options and meetings to get in the way. Here, in this space, it’s pure and clean because their only job right now is to fill this room with ideas. But Lee Pace (played by me) thinks everything is perfect because he’s found someone he’s trusted to bring in, to share in all this emptiness. He’s found someone he can be vulnerable with, to experiment and tinker alongside without worrying about fear of snark or judgement; Lee Pace has found a partner in crime. The point the show is making (I, Lee Pace, think) is that all ideas, at the beginning, are fragile and vulnerable. Talk about something too early or too soon with someone and they might shoot it down, tear it up. Or they’ll respond with disinterest and boredom. You want to write an album? Meh. You want to write poetry? That’s been done before. You wanna learn how to design a game? You want to fix this problem? You want to make a font? Or film a movie? Or be governor? Or fix the climate crisis? Yawn. Boring. Try again. There’s this enormous and overwhelming cynicism that exists out there in the world! It is sometimes unsurmountable, unbearable even! And so one of the great lessons of Halt and Catch Fire is that you have to be extremely careful with the people that you let into that big empty room. You have to be optimistic and hopeful, but careful because if some folks have proven that they can’t be trusted with early, fragile ideas and experiments then you need to stop bringing them to the whiteboard. And you need to find new folks. Because here’s the kicker: each one of us has a responsibility to push back against this tide of overwhelming cynicism in the world even though most of the time it wins, crushing everything in its path along the way. But if you’re lucky enough to find that room, and find the right folks, then maybe you’ll be safe, and maybe it won’t crush you. ↳ August 13, 2024 How I Created 175 Fonts Using Rust ↗ Here’s a fantastic post by Chevy Ray about how they made a dozens of pixel fonts using Rust: Kerning was a big time hog when making my previous font packs. Because the tools I was using required every kerning pair to be manually entered, it was incredibly time consuming and also extremely error prone. Look at it this way—if I have just three characters A B C, these are the following potential kerning pairs: AA, AB, AC, BA, BB, BC, CA, CB, and CC. That's 9 total entries! In fact, you can calculate how many entries you (may) need by just squaring the amount of characters you support. Seeing each step that Chevy went through to process and create these families is bonkers and so it’s posts like this that remind me why blogging is my absolute favorite thing. ↳ August 11, 2024 Newsletter If you’re interested in keeping up to date with my work, this is the way. Sent out maybe just a few times a year.enen1728010801https://robinrendle.com

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