I know it's overused and for example in MacOS introduces way too much white space, but people like rounded shapes. They make people more comfortable and make them think the content is simpler than when they get hard angles. It's been tested in so many research papers and the basically all agree - people like bouba more than kiki, whatever the context is.
For me the great benefit of rounded shapes is that they make it visually apparent what's foreground and what's background. If you just divide an area up into rectangular subareas, it's hard to know which of these rectangles are supposed to represent figure and which are just empty background. The T-joint between a vertical line and a horizontal line gives no clue as to whether the vertical line is supposed to connect to the left half of the horizontal line, the right half, both, or neither. A little curvature makes it clear which direction the edge of a depicted object is continuing.
On a similar note, fuck the "flat" designs which make buttons indistinguishable.
I've even seen UIs which do use bevels on buttons; but only when hovered-over! I don't want to scan my pointer across the screen hoping to find something interactive, like I'm struggling on Monkey Island!
My gripe with border-radius is that it makes everything look the same.
I'd really like more corner types. Back in the tables and sliced images days, we'd have all manner of neat angular borders, and tons of variety. Now it's all squircles everywhere.
Ninety-degree angles do not exist in nature. So you're going to get two schools of thought: UI should look more natural (and therefore round off any hard edges), or UI should intentionally embrace hard edges, as a declaration of defiance against entropy, just like any other human endeavor for industry, progress, stability, and reliability.
We used to build systems that we wished would stand the test of time. Now we build systems that only last as long as PMs care about them and their warranty period runs out. What do our design choices say about us?
Border radius has been one of the best things to happen to CSS. If you've done web development during the Internet Explorer 6 era, you'd know what I mean.
I wonder whether they want to fuck the Fernández–Guasti squircle, Lamé's special quartic, or both, and whether their desires extend to higher-dimensional sphubes. Possibly their squigonometry just can't handle such curves, and they can't control themself!
Is there a Bresenham-style algorithm similar to the midpoint algorithm for roundrects that can produce other kinds of squircles?
Let's make the (digital) world sharper
https://x.com/TheOisinMoran/status/1846417247075459235
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