📕 Research is Dangerous

March 19, 2023

This week: research! I have an idea for a chapter in the book all about Trajan’s Column so I need to bury myself in thick typographic tomes with silky paper...

📕 Side Projects, Guilt, and Useful Distractions

March 9, 2023

If one fateful night you find yourself downloading Unity and watching a tutorial about making a loathsome version of Flappy Bird with your cat’s face as the...

📕 Every Book is a Database

February 13, 2023

Book-making pals! Last week I asked Marcin somewhere around the two hour mark of the Shift Happens livestream to show us his database; it’s perhaps the...

📕 Shift Happens

February 5, 2023

Friends! This here newsletter is about the terrible first drafts, the design slip-ups, the misprints, and all the tiny failures that go into making a...

📕 The Right Box To Think Inside Of

January 29, 2023

Friends! Aza Raskin once said that great design isn’t about thinking outside the box, but finding the right box to think inside of instead. And that’s...

📕 Hyper-Typographic Book Covers

January 22, 2023

Friends! Barnes and Noble nerds! E-pals! If you ask most folks who start work on a book they’ll likely say they started on the first draft, then the second,...

📕 Letters

January 14, 2023

“What are you, little book? Reveal yourself!” It’s late on Monday evening and I’m working on prototype four and five. I want two of them this time to test...

📕 Recto, Verso, Spread

January 8, 2023

Friends! Email Correspondents! Comrades! This is year two of How Not To Make A Book, a newsletter from your upsettingly handsome host, Robin Rendle, where I...

📕 Be Kind to Your Projects But Be Kinder To Yourself

December 18, 2022

Friends! Yesterday I finished another draft of a chapter and it felt great, fantastic, life-restoring. I closed my laptop as if I had just led a cavalry...

📕 Margins and Mountains

December 13, 2022

Book pals! Titans of the publishing industry! Dad! I humbly apologize for the late entry. Last week I was moving into a new apartment and it was a lot more...

📕 The Difference That Makes All The Difference

November 21, 2022

Friends! The perfect book exists and I have found it. Lost for years in the darkest corner of my bookshelf, it only appeared as I was packing things up in...

📕 An Infinite Canvas

November 13, 2022

Friends! I was on the hunt for blackletter typefaces this week whilst doing some research for the book and I stumbled upon a Polish collection of mythologies...

📕 Twelve Down, Fourteen To Go

November 6, 2022

This week: editing, editing, editing. Also: I’m not-so-patiently waiting for prototype #002 to arrive in the mail so I’ve been cranking out as much writing...

📕 Write and Move, Write and Move

October 31, 2022

Words written: 1,052 Designs designed: 4? I dunno man, that’s a dumb metric What happened this week? A few things! I took a week off work because I was...

📕 Who is this book for?

October 17, 2022

That’s the first question someone asked me when I told them about this project: “who’s this book for?” And, I have to admit, I didn’t know how to reply....

📕 Beware the sharpest edge

October 10, 2022

This is Robin, writing to you from a wind-swept, misty cafe, and I have news of the book: a tiny white object appeared on my doorstep last week. It’s a...

📕 A Week of Things Not Done

October 3, 2022

A little pause this week: I haven’t had much energy to sit in front of the book and start the next phase of work since I know I’ll need at least a full day...

📕 Terrible Perfect Prototypes

September 25, 2022

The most important thing in the world is a prototype. It doesn’t matter if you’re making a book, a website, a billion dollar app or a rocket ship, you can...

📕 Format, format, format

September 17, 2022

Books about typography are giant, table-sized behemoths. They take up all the space in the room—the attention is on them—so that you can see the letters...

📕 TK

September 6, 2022

“A book can be inspired by nearly anything,” writes Naomi Huffman in How To Make A Book, “...a seemingly stray thought you can’t shake, a lyric, an overheard...