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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.
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 shar…
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 rich, Corinthian leather in later Mac design... sigh.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corinthian_leather
https://www.cultofmac.com/189707/steve-jobs-himself-is-respo...
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was expecting the same. 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…
Were square roots really so slow that integer addition in a loop was faster??
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Slashdot led the fray with its border-radius top-green-bar design.
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 shar…
"round corners feel natural" is no better explanation than "round corners are smoother".
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ha ha, I think you might be a machine. Easier to "interpret"? Maybe not. 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 wa…
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 representatio…