Okay, I dont know how to feel about this but.
This seems to be a literally rehashing of an article from 2011.
It even begins with the same damn text intro.
Attaching links for reference.
this article:
```
Rounded corners — they’re everywhere. From software user interfaces to hardware product design, there is something intrinsically satisfying about the look and feel of a rounded corner. In fact, designers have been using them so much that they became an industry standard rather than a design trend. But why are rounded corners so popular?
```
The article from 2011
```
Designers use rounded corners so much today that they’re more of an industry standard than a design trend. Not only are they found on software user interfaces, but hardware product designs as well. So what is it about rounded corners that make them so popular? Indeed they look appealing, but there’s more to it than that.
```
You can't just write "The following examples are taken from this great [other article]" and then proceed to copy the entire other article, swapping synonyms like you're in 9th grade and forgot about your history report until the night before.
I submitted the article after discovering it via a newsletter, but unfortunately didn't know it was plagiarized (benefitting the copycat author without properly crediting or compensating the original writer) until checking the comments much later.
Since this HN comment thread, which was well-deserved, the webpage now implies that the copycat author's account has been suspended (likely thanks to reports from HN users), noting: "ERROR 410 This account is under investigation or was found in violation of the Medium Rules. There are thousands of stories to read on Medium. Visit our homepage to find one that’s right for you."
For reference purposes, this is an archived version of the article with plagiarized content that was originally submitted: https://archive.fo/x4UDs
Pretty egregious and disingenuous article IMO. Even the captions to the pictures are the same. The only way I'd consider this even _remotely_ acceptable is if it began with an into stating "printed with permission from user 'Anthony' at uxmovement.com" or something of the sort.
Anyone reading this really needs to take a look at the articles side by side, this is extremely blatant plagiarism. They couldn't even be bothered to pick different objects for the ball and the fork
The best piece of advice I got from my dad before I started on this (for me) ambitious project was in question form: "Are you going round over all the edges? A 1/2 inch round leaves a bruise on a little one. An unfinished edge leaves a cut."
He's been right. They're psycho 2 year olds who think monkey behavior is the best. I've watched them bonk multiple times on facetime. No cuts, just a rub at the bonk spot.
We see this in product design all around us. Sharp corners cuts and hurts us. So we tend to round things over. And when we use software interfaces, I think the rounded corners engender a "this is safer" sub emotional response, and therefor more approachable.
I hate to be that guy, but this is all but guaranteed to have problems with wood movement in the long term.
Briefly: boards get wider and narrower as they absorb and release moisture from the air, respectively. The length remains constant. Anywhere you have a wide board (or glued up panel) affixed cross grain to another piece, you need to account for wood movement.
The problematic joint in this case is where the side panels run into the posts that form the corners and support the "roof".
Best case is that your grandkids live in an area with extremely constant humidity and nothing bad happens. In any other case, those wide panels are going to get wider and narrower as the seasons change and you'll either split a panel or the Kreg screws will work loose over time.
Traditionally, there are a couple of ways of dealing with this. If you're doing mortise and tenon construction, you'd have multiple mortise and tenon joints along the width of the panel/length of the post. Only one is fitted tightly and glued. The remainder are left unglued and loose along the length of the post to allow the panel to grow and shrink in width.
Table tops are traditionally joined to table bases using table buttons. Modern figure eight hardware or elongated screw holes are other equally valid options.
On the subject of rounding corners, I try to avoid a super aggressive rounding for most furniture. I agree with your dad that this is a great place to put a heavy round over. Those beds are going to be a fort, jungle gym, and probably space ship over time.
For anything that isn't going to be used quite so hard (bookshelves, for instance), I usually consider whether the client has kids or not when I'm deciding how much to break the edges.
If there aren't kids, I shoot for my old boss's standard of "looks hard, but feels soft", if there are kids, I break them a little more aggressively than that, as much for the preservation of the furniture as the children. Sharp corners wear pretty poorly, and a little extra softening helps keep the finish and wood in better shape over time at the cost of some initial crispness.
Anyhow, I hope the grandkids love the beds, and that everything works out without things loosening up over time. Just the same, maybe give them a little shake next time you visit to make sure :-)
Awesome response, thanks (glad you’re willing to be that guy). I’ll give ‘em a shake (and likely a tighten) next time. I didn’t have high hopes for the longevity of them; the parents are in school still. “Run these suckers into the ground and give ‘em away when you move” I told them. It was my first pocket screw build(s), so it was fun just for the learn of it.
Another thing about rounded edges and corners is that they're less prone to breakage. I know this from both homemade furniture, stringed musical instruments, and the homemade speakers that I use for amplifying my instruments. A softened edge will take a knock without chipping.
Glass optics (lenses, mirrors, etc.) will usually specify "protective bevel on all edges," and the fab shops know exactly what to do. The beveled edge is resistant to chipping.
I noticed this when buying prescription Gunnar glasses. The frame and lens are excellent, I would say this is the second best pair of glasses that I've ever owned. However, they came from the factory with the lenses chipped at the corners in multiple places. I can post a photo if you want, I have them right here next to me. Now looking at them and comparing with my el-cheapo everyday-wear glasses, I see that the Gunnars have no bevel along the edges of the lens.
> Rounded corners also make effective content containers. This is because the rounded corners point inward towards the center of the rectangle. This puts the focus on the contents inside the rectangle. It also makes it easy to see which side belongs to which rectangle when two rectangles are next to each other.
Personally, as a non designer and someone with close to zero natural aesthetic abilities, this single point is the one that resonates. There are some forum tools that used to choose to separate content threads by rectangles. When scrolling through a page quickly it was easy to miss where one thread started and the other finished. After the switch to rounded corners the distinction when moving fast became a lot easier to see.
I agree. As a designer, this is the point that makes the most sense to me. Rounded corners allow easy content “attribution”, and provides a natural grouping pattern.
Second would be how rounded corners on buttons or inputs helps distinguish the background and surroundings from the interactive part of the page.
I just realised that I better not say how exactly but the ability to draw anything on the screen really does centre so many excellent ways of showing you the boundaries you want highlighted... which is your clue and solution right there what to do
> We can all appreciate the aesthetic beauty of rounded corners.
Can we? Much like that top 40 song that comes on the radio way too often, I have come to find all the rounded corners off-putting. They are usually a signal of form over function, and often used by information sparse sites.
Give me square corners like HackerNews, old Reddit, or Vanguard any day.
This is super, super tangential, but I know that certain word sounds have very similar associations across almost any culture; “mom”, for example, sounds soft and warm to basically anyone who hears it, while “flak” sounds violent or harsh.
Why Does ‘Mother’ Sound The Same In So Many Languages?
The concept of “Mom” is universal — and, for the most part, so is the name we’ve given her. The reason is probably a lot simpler than you think.
the article uses science to come to arbitrary conclusions. some of their claims have no scientific evidence, but , for example, something being perceived as brighter is a good thing , it highlights it, it's not seen as a threat. corners are attractors for the visual system, and gradients give the perception of depth. Those are useful properties for UI design as they reduce the latency of our visual system by hundreds of milliseconds. I don't know if round corners have any real use
I like a little bit of rounding. Much like gaussian blur, the more subtle the effect, the more appealing it is (imo). Unfortunately, the design trend of over-the-top rounding has started to hit the mainstream and it scares me deeply. Microsoft has started baking-in rounded corners to their displays on Surface products (WHY?!), and MacOS now has more rounded corners than a Fischer-Price product.
It's a little ironic to me that we've literally resorted to "cutting corners" with our latest UX trends.
you don't think that the new Surface looks good in its own way at least?
I'm sure that it does despite being far from being my aesthetic
I mean I know as soon as I use it it's all disappointment but every time I look at the new Surface I actually want to buy one Windows 11 and all (if I could combine the talent and the means I'd r restore W2K look and feel immediately as by bid for the Nobel economic fake prize award for getting that many people back to working.
It's a waste of screen space. If they want rounded corners, they can add them in software. The average user will have no way of telling the difference.
I dunno about rounded corners for beauty - but there are cases when I find them function over form.
Recent HN discussion about the wyze cam app - it was pointed out to me that a feature I had never been able to find (and only put in a less than half-assed attempts to find tbh) - was via a HUGE green button on X screen.
Seeing as though I have used this app many many times over the past year plus, I went looking for it - and wham - it is actually there.
But.. it's a large sharp cornered bottom of the screen - which made it look like a header / footer / name of page to me.. it never dawned on me that it was a 'button' - if it had rounded corners and a drop shadow it would have be obvious to me.
Of course I had other expectations as well - that the 'thing to push' would be above the half way fold of the screen to access such an important function - and that the naming conventions would be done better - but I digress.
Now I did like the 'beauty' of slightly rounded corners back in the day when everything was sharp, and many web pages had 'sidebars' - I liked the look of a round corner there.
Sadly most content is absorbed via the mobile devices and such 'form' is not as much about beauty / style as it is to show function these days it seems.
Small data points, but another perspective that may not have been considered nonetheless.
No one could figure out how to print because it turns out that round thing in the upper left was basically the old file menu, but since it didn't look like anything else on the screen people were really confused, so much so, that as you see from the link above they just moved it to the tabbar/ribbon in the next version of office.
So, its doubtful it has anything to do with how round something is, and more to do with the drop shadowing and whether people expect a button in that location, and whether it looks like one.
thanks for the extra info - I do feel that location is also a big issues for the problem I ran into - I am apt to agree that location, size, even gradients as another mentioned; basically all the things button-ey make / made a different..
so I can see how if all the other factors were aligned, that roundness would not be an issue - so you are right - but given that the other things were out of whack in the wyze screen issue - non-roundness vs roundness would of made a difference for sure.. but yeah, if the location was better and the sizing a bit better - I can see how roundness would not matter / make much of any difference.
this has more to do with the fact that all buttons are flat now instead of gradients. Gradients are our natural way to recognize depth instantly, it is a pity that designers hate it so much. Without gradients, i guess rounded corner is the next best way to make a button look like a button .... until designers decide that they hate that as well and start using invisible ink buttons
I'm trying to remember what the method was, though I seem to recall border-radius being a property which could be applied to tables. And of course, Slashdot was a table-defined layout site.
Nobody does that any more.
(With a very few hackish exceptions, some of which may be news to you... ;-)
Checking IAWBM: the original site design used a Gif for the design element:
Taking triangles off a corner is called a chamfer. If you're cutting it off, the material ends up on the floor or vaccines up, then recycled into new stock
The corners of their papers were all docked[1]. Recycling paper is certainly possible, just not terribly efficient. Throughout the story, they're extremely resource constrained. My question isn't generic, it's "how the hell does this aesthetic choice survive in that environment".
I don't agree with a lot of what Jobs did, but he was absolutely right about rounded rectangles.
> Bill's technique used the fact the sum of a sequence of odd numbers is always the next perfect square (For example, 1 + 3 = 4, 1 + 3 + 5 = 9, 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 = 16, etc). So he could figure out when to bump the dependent coordinate value by iterating in a loop until a threshold was exceeded. This allowed QuickDraw to draw ovals very quickly.
Still blows my mind. I have a hankering to try to blind-rewrite this algorithm knowing only the above.
I wouldn't be surprised if that is still the case. Rule of thumb is that sqrt is on the order of 10x as expensive as integer addition, though this obviously depends on a lot of factors.
Because the siege engines will round them off anyway if we make them sharp and our castle ever comes under attack. And our defending archers can better rain arrows down on attackers approaching from any direction from a rounded tower.
Worth noting that in addition to the ability of defenders to see every part of the wall, star forts have the advantage of making artillery fire more likely to hit the wall at an oblique angle, reducing the odds of a direct hit and (probabilistically) reducing the energy imparted to destroying the wall.
I was with them up until the diagram where the straight lines seemed much better. Not that it distracts from the main argument. It might just be that I expect straight lines on diagrams like that and not curves
It's also trivial example with 3 boxes. A more complex diagram with curved lines will start to look very inconsistent without a graphics designer cleaning things up.
+1
The straight line diagram is easier to read for me as well. While I sometimes enjoy curved lines for diagrams, I think the ones the author chose were too curvy for my taste.
do I have some sort of condition? not one point in there made sense to me. "which is easier to look at?" they're both the same, to me. one is pointier, the other rounder, but that doesn't make one easier to interpret than another.
UX people are mostly high on fresh MacBook packing material fumes I think.
Easier on the eyes though is one aspect of the point they are making, an aspect I can get behind.
I think there is a way of thinking where you step outside yourself, try to see things in a novel way as though seeing them for the first time. I think in those times of reflection/meditation, you do see how maybe a thing like a shape can worm its way into your subconscious — cause a mild sense of unease for example.
Designers, artists, I would argue are more in tune with that — maybe more sensitive to it?
I think it is much more simple - the power of suggestion.
if I was shown a picture of an explosion and a picture of a flower, then asked "which is more peaceful" I would not be able to pick, because pictures are all equally peaceful. a picture may depict something, but a picture is a picture. what's that? oh you meant to ask about the content of each picture? well now you've completely eliminated any 2D representation of anything, and are now talking solely about explosions and flowers; concepts independent of media. oh but UX person wanted me to think that because an explosion is inherently less peaceful than a flower, that makes a picture of an explosion less peaceful than a picture of a flower? NOPE. totally separate things. try again, UX person.
this is what confuses me. shapes are shapes and have no inherent feeling or opinion about anything. if you want to talk about the concept depicted by each shape then you're no longer talking about the shapes at all; you've left user-experience-ville.
but UX people use a normal person's desire to couple the photograph itself and the subject in the photograph to say "round corners are better, here's a whole article about it" and normal people will (apparently) say things like "sharp corners are so much more jarring for my eyes and make it so much more difficult for light to pass through my pupils so obviously I'm on team round-corner."
just feels like mental slight-of-hand, like someone is trying to trick me into agreeing.
I mean look back at the toolbars on Windows applications from 20 years ago. those icons meant NOTHING (beyond the simple cut, copy and paste icons, really) and we all learned what each meant. and don't you dare try to tell me that a floppy disk icon naturally means "save" and definitely could not also mean "load" or even just "floppy disk" which is what it actually represents. you try depicting the concept of "saving a file to disk" on a button with enough room for a 16x16 image supporting 16 colors.
shapes don't mean ANYTHING. they have no meaning or inherent ease of viewing at all. at best all you can do is hope users either memorize the shape-to-action relationship table or know how to show the tooltips.
I say that UX people are crackpots, but I've worked with a few and they all seemed very sane and well-thought out folks, so I dunno. but then there's this article saying a sunburst shape is "harder to look at" than a circle shape and then it is hard to go anywhere other than going straight to "UX people are nuts!"
Brad Trommel, an artist, analysed the rounded vs square icons in a video about the infantilization of the western culture. He suggested that the rounded shape are 'easier on the eyes' bc they remind people of childrens toys. Same for the choice to shift to a hypersaturated pastel color pallets. This leads to a more suggestable mind set and fits well with dark patterns.
I, for one, lament the new ecological direction of MacBook packing materials; there's damn little bisphenyl to get high on these days.
More seriously: I found the examples in the article quite interesting. "Which of these is easier to look at?" The high frequency of the starlike shape (spiky circle?) and the fork tines induce a bit of fatigue versus the given example alternatives. But I found the curved lines and the grid of rounded rectangles to be of a similar noise: added visual complexity that required more effort.
You'll barely even notice the change. I just tried it on all my most favorite websites. No change in "feelings".
The reason probably being the other UI fad, which is to make everything so lacking in contrast, that it's hard to discern the difference between round/sharp corners, even if you focus on it.
I have some sweet memories of rounded corners in HTML/CSS from my early days in Development. Rounded corners were nice, subtle, and pleases the eye but it was hard before CSS supported it.
The idea was to use Photoshop to round the corners and "slice" those elements and used them as background images in CSS. In Photoshop, one has to know the trick to "feather" (I hope I'm using the right term) the corners for a smoothly rounded corner, else you get pixelated ones.
This happens pretty often and is a monotonous boring task after a while for the team. My team and I created a 9-Splicer tool in Flash, wrapped in a Windows Program (forgotten the name of the paid tool). Now any front-end developer could use different styles of rounded corners from the varieties of rounded corner graphics that the designer creates in her spare time.
None of these is the main reason. Sharp corners feel artificial, round corners feel natural. You might find objects with a sharp edge but it is very abnormal for a geometric object like a square wood or a three sided broken rock to have all the corners be sharp, at least one is chipped or worn out. They are also more comfortable to touch and interact with when round. This is why car stereo buttons aren't usually sharp cornered as well.
It's a pretty reasonable explanation for why they're popular. Something that looks artificial looks out of place and doesn't blend. It's aesthetically unpleasing. Just take a haircut. There's a reason rounded shapes on a beard or a hairline look better than cutting a 90 degree angle into your head which makes you look like Minecraft Steve.
We're fine tuned to notice things that stand out as artificial and we usually respond to it in a negative way. The uncanny valley effect is another example.
If I’m going to be honest: round corners on a computer feel unnatural. There’s skeuomorphism but it’s all a facade just like the second stories on strip malls in nicer suburbs.
The "We are conditioned for round corners" was a bit far-fetched in terms of how it relates to design in my opinion. As the article asks the reader to think about its purpose, agreeing that there is a place for sharp edges.
I wouldn't let my child play with a fork, but I wouldn't let them eat their dinner with a ball either?
No, there's something "intrinsically" old-fashioned about round corners. Windows XP had round corners.
But I guess I'm just not in tune with the UI fashion cycle, in 5 years, pointed corners will be the next big thing again, along with enthusiastic blog posts from UI designers about how "intrinsically satisfying" those pointed corners are.
Objects with sharp angles are easier to break. External corners are easily damaged. Metal corner guards for cabinets are often rounded, and that makes them not only safer for people but also rugged.
Internal corners concentrate stresses, making it easier to start a crack and break the object.
Sharp corners are easy to produce, requiring less tooling, and so look cheap.
I think rounded is what sharp corners will look like over time. A woodworker takes a block plane and chamfers the edge of the furniture they are working on so that it isn't instantly dinged up within days of being in the buyer's home.
At the same time then, a sharp-edged piece of furniture shows that either the material itself is extremely strong, resilient, or shows that the owner is fastidious in the care of their furniture. The sharp edge is perhaps a subtle status-symbol.
> Sharp corners are easy to produce, requiring less tooling, and so look cheap.
An artifact of modernity, surely? Historically, tight, neat corners required large amounts of skill and the right tools to create, whereas there were many approaches to rounding-off an arbitrary corner or edge.
My take -- curious to know counter points or alternate thoughts:
1. Novelty drives some preferences and trends - so there will be cycles of round corners followed by squarish corners and back to round corners.
2. Whatever is DIFFICULT to achieve with current commonly available tools and technology is considered classy and EASY is considered cheap. In early Web days, HTML tables and DIVs only supported square corners. iPhone/iOS with it's rounded buttons and text boxes was all novel and engineered UX. Now it is easily supported by simple CSS -- I see rounded corners overused in even government websites with horrible UX so rounded corners do not automatically invoke a premium feel anymore unless there are other elements of careful UX design.
Same argument about "hand-drawn" illustrations feeling special when hard geometric lines and clean curves are more common/easy.
Similar reason why use of Times New Roman and now Calibri font (default in MS Word) feels lazy.
I must be different as I prefer diagrams with square cornered lines.
I don't think it's just a matter of square or rounded as there are many variations of round. I have clients say they only want sutle roundness as too much round makes the UI feel like a toy.
Comparing a font using all caps with a font using lowercase isn't a fair comparison, we know that all caps is harder to read (source: some paper at some point as an undergrad when I had no bibliographic database - and my own experience).
I agree with the comments that see no real benefit to the rounded corners except for the one comment I read that points out that we see sharper corners as more fragile.
I think there may be some sunk-cost bias here - if you spent a lot of time and energy making rounded corners at a time when CSS didn't make it easy, now you'll have quite a bit of cognitive dissonance concluding that rounded corners are no better than sharp ones.
The corner in that picture looks absolutely disgusting, you can see the discontinuity. I would rather have a square corner if you are not going to bother to round them properly.
The way to actually produce rounded squares is to fix the curvature, and then solve for a corresponding curve. You want at least a differentiable function for the curvature. Something with a bit of a spike (think of a Gaussian, but make it level off to flat after the spikes). From the curvature you can use something like the Frenet–Serret formula, integrate and find a formula for a curve. You then approximate it with a bunch of bezier curves. Should get something nice and smooth.
Because Apple did it. Rounded corners is 50s design and was considered kitsch, but once it became associated with the privilege of owning an idevice it became ubiquitous and impossible to quit. I am one of those who has gotten sick of them
Funny last week we removed all the rounded corners. We set a border css variable so all the border rules became
border-radius: var(--border-size);
We figured this way every 6 months or so we could switch between squares and rounded edges... This may provide little design pops to give a fresh feeling to users... we'll see so far it feels very fresh to me.
How strange! I'm constantly complaining about how we build everything with these inhuman, objectionable square corners! And everyone seems to think I'm crazy (for that). So I assumed we were trained to love square corners.
And the article offers no proof more compelling than my own anecdata. So I haven't changed my mind yet.
In 3 years someone will post an almost identical article with a bunch of wishy washy points about why sharp edges are easier to look at and easier to read. None of this is meaningful, it's just fashion. Tide comes in, tide goes out.
It's really just a preference. We also tend to like things that are different from what we're bored of, so square/round corners can be a fad. I always felt that's why Microsoft changed their UI design back and forth.
Because round corners look more natural to humans, the natural word produces almost nothing that is a perfect right angle (which we can easily see with the naked eye), so soft corners a more familiar to us and less artificial.
One major reason that seems unattributed is that with the Web 2.0 movement around late 2000s we started to round most elements (buttons, div containers, input boxes...) in web design.
The article from 2011 ``` Designers use rounded corners so much today that they’re more of an industry standard than a design trend. Not only are they found on software user interfaces, but hardware product designs as well. So what is it about rounded corners that make them so popular? Indeed they look appealing, but there’s more to it than that. ```
What do you think about this, HN?
Link for ref: https://uxmovement.com/thinking/why-rounded-corners-are-easi...