Corners ~ rounded or not

[Dan Q]

Rounded corners will continue to go in and out of fashion

It's been really interesting to speculate about why this fashion trend occurs. Here's my favourite hypothesis:

- Sharp in the 90s: Square corners are computationally-easier, so they were the norm in early windowing systems and, by proxy, early web design; sometimes a piece of software - often a media player! - would buck the trend and that was radical and interesting.

- Rounded in the 00s: New hardware and software features for determining occlusion in windowing systems and rounding corners with CSS etc., plus increasing colour depth allowing "shadowing" effects, opened up the possibility of all kinds of new interfaces; this coincided with a dramatic uptick in the adoption of home computers with Internet access. Operating systems wanted to lean into this trend to seem "friendly" and "soft", see e.g. MacOS's Aqua interface from 2000 and then Windows XP from 2001.

- Furthermore, screen resolutions were dramatically increasing: by 2010 "full HD" 1920x1080 screens were starting to become commonplace and soft corners - which effectively "waste" space - were becoming harmless: losing a 16px square on each corner of a window is a big deal at 800x600, but with four times as many pixels to play with, it's not a big deal any more!

- Sharp in the 10s: The pivot the other way coincided with the meteoric growth of the popularity of smartphones between 2010 and 2020; these relatively small-screen, low-power devices had all the same problems that desktop computers had had twenty years earlier: a shortage of pixels and processing power... plus the computational cost of managing occlusions and calculating curves had a real, measurable cost in battery life! So mobile phone UI designers went more "square", and design trends followed.

- Rounded in the 20s: And now mobile phones are more pixel-rich and have faster processors... so we're swinging back the other way: rounded corners and "squircles" are appearing everywhere again!

It almost seems like, in general, humans prefer rounded interfaces but are held back by the limitations of technology?

[AY38910]

I'm more used to sharp corners.
I've been seeing rounded corners (whether it'd be squircles or flat out ovals) a lot with the current web and my mind associates them with the Material You style and the corporate web. Which is boring. Not to mention all the icky things underneath the surface that they put.
Plus that extra screen estate is just wasted to make things look so modern and fancy, like modern phones for example.

If there's a little bit of squircle, sure I can let it pass, but I'm a sharp corner guy. Plus with sharp corners things can look arranged and tidy. IMO, at least.

Same, but with some exceptions (Frutiger Aero and the Windows XP default theme, for example)

[Seechain]

I would like to hear about your thoughts on corners, how do you use them in your web design and how do they make you feel?

I remember seeing rounded corners that were actually 4 images with a transparent edge, one in each corner and other rounded corners that were just a background image and finally rounded corners with CSS (the most boring of all).

I remember making a lot of signatures and avatars with rounded corners, beveled edges, and drop shadows. They felt modern and also showed a certain level of technical skill (now it all seems very silly to me).   

[ValyceNegative]

Can I say... both is good? Cue in that gif of Eldorado's Tullio and Miguel xD

But really, I like to mix and match! I like shapes that are all squared corners except one or two, which depending on the direction can "open" new spaces and divide paragraphs without putting everything into a box. This is what I do for my text dividers: I have a main one that creates some sort of "roof" for the text right under it (this is an example, with the divider that says "Queue": https://www.valycenegative.it/?blog=OVQttQFTdZ8f91rSs0SFK ) and a totally squared one that simply highlights a title but doesn't stop the flow of text while reading (I use them here for Site Map, Layouts and Awards: https://www.valycenegative.it/?blog=6UJw1zyNCabhzA3dKIccaC ).

Going beyond dividers, my whole site layout is a big combination of squared corners encapsulating round ones, boxes that are squared but terminate with a round side, and a lot of... squares that have their corners just sliiiiiiiiiiiightly smoothed out.

The important thing to me is to know the differences between a rounded corner and a squircle, and to never use squircles. U_U rounded corners I can understand, but squircles irritate me. xD They just don't know what they want to be! >:C