Friends! Pals! Elaborate and Mysterious Bots who have subscribed to this newsletter! ‘Tis I—Robin Rendle and you likely subscribed to this once-in-a-while newsletter from my website. You can, of course, unsubscribe at any time.

I just did a big and scary thing.

There’s not enough words in the English language to describe how cool it is to build a little publishing machine. That rare, lightning-in-a-bottle feeling of throwing a few services together and building something greater than the sum of its parts. For example: last night I was polishing the final touches of The Cascade, a fresh new blog about CSS and front-end development—look!—

—and I realized that I have so much power at my fingers! I started daydreaming about vast, independent publishing empires rising and falling before me with just a few links to Stripe and Memberful (and a sprinkling of HTML). After I recovered from my reverie I had built a functional membership program.

That’s...incredible!

Friends! The new year is upon us! This is Robin Rendle here, and you likely subscribed to this, my very infrequent personal newsletter, from my website (although you can unsubscribe at any time). But first up: a naval-gazing roundup of what happened on the blog this year. Then: oh, that’s it? Well, okay! Fine!

i.

In January I wrote about container queries, typography, and how all our dreams of responsive typesetting is now possible:

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.

Friends!

It’s been a hot minute and the last few weeks have been busy with blogging and redesigning my website and doing interviews. Let’s take a look:

• The redesign of my website was real fun, I like where it’s at now, and I wrote a bit about why I changed some things around. It definitely looks less serious and merging the /about page and the homepage was smart. You know when Mr Chris Coyier takes notice, then you’re onto something.
• I’ve been struggling in portfolio reviews whilst looking for a new gig. They’re hard because they encourage a kind of dance that I hate doing.
• I’ve been in love with the Kobo Libra 2 the last few months and if you’re on the look out for a great e-reader then I’d point this your way. Also you can add custom fonts to it! Huzzah!

Friends! Comrades of the Eternal Gloom!

This week I’ve been mopey—“Off Balance” if we’re going to describe our emotions with Baldur’s Gate 3 status descriptions—and it’s been rough-going for a few reasons but we’re going to push through it all, screaming as we go, pretending that everything is okay together.

But, I have to admit, things aren’t okay.

This week I saw this great tree and, unrelatedly, I’ve been enthralled with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles soundtrack because it doesn’t sound like a bunch of songs you’d slap into a kid’s film but instead sounds like a corporeal beast that crawled out of a sewer. It’s a mean and angry thing so, as always, my biological father Trent Reznor never fails to disappoint.

What else happened this week? What have I been up to? Not much on the blog front besides this one piece:

1. I asked why websites are embarrassing and made the comparison with books where the baseline of design is pretty good.
2. Chris wrote a great follow-up and reply.

Friends! Book pals! Fellow worshipers of Shar!

A few stressful interviews this week, two dozen hours thrown into Baldur’s Gate to recover, and I just finished the ever-so-great Dolly Parton’s America this morning. First up this week there’s a new book I have my eye on and then we take a stroll to the Book Club of California. Let’s do this thing.

This week: a few quick notes on job hunting. But first, an update from the blog. This week I wrote about...

• The two types of paintings
• Reviving old type for TV and movies
• My new portfolio that still needs a lot of work, but it’s slowly getting there.

Also this week I’ve been taking a lot more brooding walks up into the hills of Noe Valley where the houses are upsettingly beautiful and the weather has been unusually hot and stuffy. Here, the city:

Friends! Pals! Digital librarians!

I’ve been thinking about what makes a website cool and it all started with this note from Henry:

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

Gustave Doré, Illustration for John Milton’s “Paradise Lost“, 1866.

Friends! Comrades! Fellow satanists!

Friends! Mates! Pub-folk of the Westcountry!

I have returned.

It is I, Robin Rendle, first of his name, and this newsletter was sadly abandoned when I zipped over to the UK for a week. It’s been a while since my last e-message because I’ve been furiously walking all over Devon and Cornwall in a total and complete state of jet-lag.

Friends! Sailors!

Salman Rushdie was in his twenties and wrote a cracking failure of a novel; imitative of the books he loved, too much like Pynchon. He knew it was a terrible thing, unpublishable even, and so into a drawer this book went, never to be mentioned again.

Thirty years later, he digs it out and confidently, with a smile, reads a snippet of the book. Now I would be devastated to have written a novel that went nowhere. I wouldn’t be talking about it, although I would be holding this nowhere-novel around my neck like an albatross. But not Salman: “at least,” he says, “I knew not to take it any further. My shit-detector was working.”

This is from Salman Rushdie’s MasterClass on fiction writing. He talks about how to write dialogue, how to find a subject, how to research, how to avoid bullshit. One of the most interesting bits from the class is this part, where he talks about character design:

Friends!

Blackletter fonts are back in vogue.

Yesterday I made an update to my website with some big, blocky colors and wild new typographic styles; Fakir now takes center stage. I’ve been wanting to use this typeface for more than a decade since each letter looks like it was shaved out of a large block of marble and great care was taken to smooth out the decorative edges that garner each flank.

But when you stack these letters close together like I’ve done here then there’s this real WHOA WHAT feeling that only a great font can give you.

Friends! Pals! CSS deviants!

One thing I’ve always loved about CSS, besides its obvious and immediate effect on a webpage—wow this table is now red!—is that it prods, pokes, and questions you over the years. CSS never sits still, not just in terms of small properties and browser quirks that get pushed out over time, but big philosophical things about CSS too.

And since I quit my job last week, I’ve been tryna catch up on all the CSS drama that’s been happening lately. There’s so much news! But here’s a few things that I reckon are gonna change how I make websites in the near future.

Friends! Pals! Treasured work associates!

Last month Mandy Brown wrote about how she struggled to quit her job 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.

“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.”

I’ve returned to Hyrule this week; I’m exploring caves teeming with bioluminescent fish, fusing mushrooms to every shield that I find, and mercilessly stomping on any goblins that dare get in my way. My love for this game is unexpected though because I wasn’t into Breath of the Wild at all—what with its floaty combat, mostly annoying physics, and meh story—yet I’m utterly obsessed with Tears of the Kingdom.

So what makes this game so good? Two thoughts here.

First: a video by NakeyJakey about the problems with Rockstar games. It’s a great review where he argues that in Red Dead Redemption and GTA, Rockstar will give the player a set of tools to explore a beautiful world and then suddenly decide that you must do things precisely the way they want you to. Did you want to sneak through that house? Game over. Oh you wanted to run away from this fight? Game over. Did you want to park your horse anywhere else except this little yellow marker on the map?

Game. Over.

Hi hi hi. Robin here.

It’s Saturday. I’m up early, dressed, eated, walked. Now: under an awning outside my favorite cafe in the city, with the rain making a racket all around me. Who cares though? I’m deep in the stack of writing and CSS-ing and there’s simply no amount of screaming kids, howling dogs, or thundering rain that can stop me.

I’m invincible right now because I’m building an archive.

Pals! Nerds! Photo-buddies!

I just hit the big green publish button on a new essay about photography, networks, and shadows called…wait for it…In Praise of Shadows.

Back in February I picked up a camera, the FujiFilm X100V, and then spent six months in a photography-shaped hole: tidying up images in Lightroom, reading blog posts about ISO, scrubbing through videos about FujiFilm cameras and editing and where to put your feet to take a good shot. All these new skills became…addictive…because I knew effectively nothing about photography. I was a beginner again! I could ask really dumb questions on forums! And read books without the burden of experience!

📕 Whittle; to sharpen; to render eager or excited

This weekend: Portland. We’re on the return flight south after watching Pop-Up Magazine, walking around the Japanese Garden, and eating delirious amounts of food.

A good time was had by all. But what else happened this week?

Super secret literary society!

(It’s so secret that you didn’t even realize you were a part of it, huh? Other secret societies can only wish they were as secret as mine.)

I’m writing to you from a tiny coffee shop, click-clacking away at this essay about photography. Last night I moved all of my notes out of Keynote and into Figma because 1. my enthusiasm had stalled and 2. I hoped that just pushing things around would encourage me to delete a lot of junk or fill in the gaps that have been sitting around since February.

And it worked!

Friends and intergalatic, spacefaring warriors!

I am writing to you from here:

This weekend I’m tagging along with C to a medical conference in Hollywood, Florida. We got in late last night and I’ve been walking around town this morning alone only to discover that this is a land of beaches and hotels and cars cars cars. But, despite that, it’s extremely lovely to walk around in shorts and hop along the beach listening to music with no shoes on and trying not to think about how folks here have terraformed this hostile world by moving almost exclusively inside air-conditioned mobile pods and then shifting an almost unfathomable amount of cement around so that they can drive tractors to the beach and flatten out the sand so it’s just perfect for my little toes.

Pals!

I’m struggling this morning. My focus is all over the place. So! I’ll just pop out for a quick walk and wake up a bit. Please hold whilst I go for a long brood across the closest thing I have to a highland moor.

Thank you.

< walking... >

< brooding... >

< walking... >

< returns... >

< falls deep into an Elden Ring shaped hole... >

< several days pass... >

< slowly climbs out of hole... >

< goes for another walk... >

Okay, so this week: three things. First off, I adore this typeface-in-progress by Erik van Blockland, LTR Principia, which is just a very strange and condensed assortment of letters that I really, really like:

I’ve always adored Erik’s work, and his especially odd website. Make sure to click around and see all the peculiar projects he’s been hacking away at.

Second: Kobodaishi by Nick Sherman is an absolute wonder. Like Principia, I don’t think you can actually purchase this thing yet but it’s wonderful in a very different way with stately, tall, and very happy letters:

Copains!

Robin here. I’m writing to you from a small Parisian hotel, hidden in a back alley in the 2nd arrondissement, and I’m still dazed from the trains and the walking and even more trains on top of that.

Last night we stumbled into the hotel foyer where cool bank robber music bounced along the walls and welcomed us from every direction. Well-dressed and dimly-lit strangers whispered French and German and Japanese behind enormous plants and swirling wine glasses. It was the most beautiful sight after a long day of travel—enormous windows opened up into a courtyard full of strangers and bright plants swung (swang?) from every surface so that I assumed that we’d mistakenly walked into a greenhouse.

In short: it was cool as hell.

Friends!

This week: England. London. The cold, cloudy place.

It’s been…4 years? Far too long, really. So long, in fact, that the accents are strange to me now, the air is colder, and the cussing has improved across the board. Also, words like “nab” make me stop for half a beat to properly interpret.

Friends! Chums! Mates!

Two things this week. First, a reminder: the finest compliment you can give someone is not a retweet, a like, or a follow. Instead, the best expression of thanks is to link to their work.

Here’s one example: earlier this week I was reading a book and it quoted a chap who linked to a blog post which linked back to…my blog! Wha—? And also: wot? It was that rare sort of ~Publishing Feeling~ I get when I can see my own hyperlinks make their return trip home. There’s this punch-to-the-gut when someone links to my work or points back at a note somewhere in the ol’ archives and it’s nothing short of exhilarating. There’s no higher honor, no kind of thanks giving better.

But is that feeling…good? That feeling I get when someone links to my work? Is it desperate? Isn’t it just a selfish hunger for fame and attention? Sure, probably, deep down that’s likely the case (my dad once asked what I wanted to be when I grow up and when I was 8 I turned to him very seriously and exclaimed that “I want to be a great man of history!” At the time I didn’t quite understand that you have to do certain things to be great, I just wanted to see my own face printed in books and etched on stone).

Hyperlink compatriots!

Robin Rendle here. This morning began with a slow but productive start. I was up early. Showered. Dressed. Laundry. Dishes. Trash. Breakfast. After all that the Mobile Depression Device told me that my screen time was up 30% this week which sounds about right. I still feel dazed from all the screens.

And so today there will be only books, only reading. Let’s begin:

If a Web site is moved, deleted, or hidden behind a paywall, every link that pointed to it becomes meaningless, dangling like an anchor line cut loose from a ship.

Late-night edition of the newsletter this week, folks. But a quick reminder: I’m Robin Rendle, a web designer and writer, and you likely subscribed to this newsletter via my website.

Apologies in advance, etc. etc.

Last year I barely read at all. I just couldn’t sit still, couldn’t find anything that captured my attention. I spent the whole year up to my neck in video games; tuning in, dropping out. But this week I’ve been reading Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro and it’s light-hearted and earnest and all the things that I want from a novel. It’s reminded me what novels are capable of.

Remember last week when I said I feel online again, all systems go? Well, this is the book to blame for that. And so I’ve found myself in love with stories and literature and reading all over again—reading in the morning and in the middle of the night. But if I was absolutely honest here—perhaps cringingly, painfully honest—then it’s more than love that I’ve found in this book.

I’ve found...purpose? Ew.

Friends, colleagues, arch nemeses!

This is your friendly neighborhood newsletter from me, Robin Rendle, and you likely subscribed a short while ago from my website. This is the inaugural edition and I’m not entirely sure what this is, or what it will be just yet.

Oh and feel free to hit the reply button whenever you like; feedback, insults, and adoring compliments are always welcome.

Let’s get to it.