Robin Rendle

A designer-writer whose highlighted essays argue for owning your own website, chasing product vibes over data, and treating creativity as the residue of stubborn daily work.

Robin Rendle is a designer and writer who publishes on his own site, robinrendle.com, in short, opinionated notes about the independent web, typography, personal publishing, and the slow decay of platforms. The highlights collected here are drawn almost entirely from those notes, and they cluster around a few stubborn convictions: that depending on any single platform is the original mistake, that great products come from caring about the thing rather than the metrics, and that creativity is not a temperament you possess but a byproduct of grinding at the work. He is a designer who writes like a craftsperson thinking out loud, and the passages flagged here are the ones where his taste hardens into an argument.

Own the means of production

Rendle's founding belief about the web is that you should own your own website. In Notes on Blogging he traces it back to his late teens, staying up until 2am reading "smart things from smart people so very far away because it felt like an act of rebellion," and to the designers of that era who "argued to own the means of production: own your website! Don't use a third party blogging platform because it could all be taken down, deleted, or ransacked."¹ Blogging, for him, was a "Great Struggle Machine, a tool to bring brilliant people into my life."¹ The environment that best serves it is deliberately modest: "Early mornings. Coffee in hand. Sitting in a roomful of strangers with the rain outside. That is the perfect writing environment."¹

Instability and the platform mistake

That ownership instinct becomes an argument in Instability, written against the backdrop of Nilay Patel's "Google Zero" — the moment Google Search stops sending traffic to third-party sites. Where others feel dread, Rendle feels vindicated. He would only panic "if my business was entirely dependent on Google but boy trusting any of these platforms in the first place was the real problem there." The whole point of the web, he argues, is that "we're not supposed to be dependent on any one company or person or community to make it all work."² The web only felt stable while "the analytics money flowed in our direction"; when it stops, every publisher turns out to have "set up shop perilously on the edge of an active volcano."² His diagnosis of how this happened is blunt: web advertising and front-page rankings meant "piles of cash" for a lucky few, but "under the hood this broke the web" so that "Google became the front-door of the whole internet." Turning the web into a "platform" was "very, very, very good to certain lucky folks but also very, very, very bad for the collective web."² He notes, almost in passing, that he already ignores SEO in his own writing, because optimizing for a search engine only leads to "bad writing, like SEO-written titles."²

Chase the product, not the data

If instability is what platforms do to the web, data-worship is what they do to product teams. In Chase the Product, Not the Data, riffing on Nike over-indexing on its online shopping data while "product with mass appeal rotted in warehouses," Rendle lands two lines the user flagged. First, on research: "The value of research doesn't come from elevating people who are already shouting. It comes from finding the people who are not being heard, and adding their voices to the conversation."³ Second, the sharper claim: "You can only build a great product if you care more for the vibes than for the data."³ His read is that people point at data because they can't see the product — they don't use it and have no feelings about it.

Design ain't a democracy

The same suspicion of process shows up in Design Ain't a Democracy, where the enemy is consensus. Most tech companies are slow, he argues, because managers "aren't really there to make decisions" — these organizations are "designed explicitly not to make decisions." The result is "tons of back and forth about competing ideas or competing projects instead of building things (building should be hard, decisions should be easy and if that's not the case then it's management who's to blame)." Indecision breeds "all sorts of wacko pseudo-scientific ways to prioritize tasks" and "whackier ways of measuring the success of a product (NPS, questionnaires, etc.)."⁴ His alternative is a single decisive director — someone who can "say yes, go, ship ship ship."

Ideas are vulnerable

A counterweight to the ship-it decisiveness is his care for the fragile early stage of an idea. In Ideas Are Vulnerable, drawing on a scene from Halt and Catch Fire, he argues that early ideas need protection from the wrong audience. The lesson: "you have to be extremely careful with the people that you let into that big empty room." 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."⁵ The theme rhymes with The Story Is a Codebase, where he uses Obsidian's graph view to write fiction and finds that seeing the connections frees him: "I feel like I'm free now to write absolute junk. And this is vital for any creative thing!" You have to feel your mistakes won't be judged, because the pressure of "trying to write the next great American novel" is a recipe to fail.⁶

Creativity is a byproduct of work

His most-highlighted idea is a rejection of inspiration as a precondition. In Creativity Is the Byproduct of Work, quoting Jürgen Geuter — "You are not creative and then create something, you become creative by working on something, creativity is a byproduct of work"⁷ — he recounts breaking a design problem only after "fifty iterations" and "every bad idea possible." The realization: "Great ideas don't come to me if I wait for them, they happen whilst I'm bouncing my head off the wall."⁷ The counsel that follows is characteristically flat: "Don't wait. Just keep noodling. Creativity isn't a thing that you are... Creativity isn't luck, either." It is "simply a byproduct of work."⁷

mindmap
  root((Robin Rendle))
    Independent web
      Own your website
      Google Zero / instability
      Ignore SEO
    Product taste
      Chase vibes, not data
      Design needs a director
      Protect fragile ideas
    Craft of work
      Creativity is a byproduct of work
      Keep noodling, don't wait
      Freedom to write junk
    Objects & attention
      Kobo Libra 2
      GT Alpina typography
      Work is just work

Objects, typography, and attention

Rendle's material tastes are of a piece with his arguments. His love letter to the Kobo Libra 2 praises a device "in a market that had largely lost interest in e-readers": fast, long-lived, with physical buttons and custom fonts — on the first day he uploaded his "trusty GT Alpina" (the same typeface he admiringly spots on other people's sites). His favorite feature is a matter of respect for attention: when you set it down, "it just shows the last book you were reading. No ads for random flirty romance novels... In that way it feels respectful of your time and attention."⁸ The same value governs his relationship to labor. In Work is just work he confesses he "loves work" yet refuses overtime, citing an Ira Glass interview that says "if you like work so much then it really is ok to prioritize your life with work at the very center and you shouldn't feel bad about it."⁹ — a permission, not an obligation, and pointedly not the same as letting an employer exploit that enthusiasm into burnout.

Recurring convictions

Related

• Craig Mod — a kindred designer-writer on books, walking, and the independent web
• Obsidian — the tool Rendle uses to write fiction via its graph view
• UI/UX and Visual Design Craft
• Writing and Note-Taking as Thinking
• Independence and Refusing to Compete
• The Attention Economy and Dopamine Culture
• Overview