[0x7E3]

> 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.

[magicjosh]

The full article goes into the advantages and disadvantages of rounded corners.

From the article:

+ Boxy shapes are commonly seen as reliable, uniform, traditional, and professional.

+ Round shapes are commonly seen as charismatic, endearing, harmless, and friendly.

Sounds like you and the authors would agree.

[Beltalowda]

I wonder how much of that is cultural; do people in China, India, Indonesia, Africa, etc. have the same perceptions and associations?

[ketzo]

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.

[jallen_dot_dev]

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

[JKCalhoun]

Very cool. Thanks.

[DoreenMichele]

Even more tangential than thou:

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.

https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/why-does-mother-sound-the...

[jdrc]

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

[0x7E3]

Yes, I agree with several of the points made in the article.

[smoldesu]

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.

[Cullinet]

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.

[smoldesu]

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.

[stevenicr]

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.

[StillBored]

Well this was fundamentally one of the issues with ms office when they went to the ribbon. see: https://www.jegsworks.com/lessons/numbers-2/intro/ribbon-off...

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.

[stevenicr]

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.

[jdrc]

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

[davidivadavid]

Hacker News has rounded corners on its buttons.

[0x7E3]

Yep, and they are in the least information dense part of the page!

[iqanq]

Your browser sets those.

[dredmorbius]

Slashdot led the fray with its border-radius top-green-bar design.

[memco]

That was in the bad old days before CSS border-radius existed and you had to use transparent GIFs and lots of other fun tricks.

[dredmorbius]

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:

https://web.archive.org/web/19980113191222/https://slashdot....

https://web.archive.org/web/19980418031312im_/http://slashdo...

[klyrs]

I kinda like the notched corners of Battlestar Galactica, personally. Though I always did wonder what happened to all the triangles...

[8note]

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

[klyrs]

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".

[1] https://www.famefocus.com/tv/33-things-didnt-know-battlestar...

[HWR_14]

They had several side by side comparisons on straight vs rounded. Which one(s) didn't you agree with?