fuckborderradius.com
fuckborderradius.comMy contribution to the genre: negative border radius.
Let's make the (digital) world sharper
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.
I prefer bevels for that. In particular, I grew up with the Amiga's "3-D look" where embossed = interactive and recessed = informative https://archive.org/details/amiga-user-interface-style-guide...
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!
Bevels are indeed very helpful for that. Mystery-meat navigation has been a UI design problem for a long time.
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.
You might be delighted to learn that upcoming `corner-shape` is fixing that.
Also you still can use your sliced images with `border-image`.
You can use negative border radius to get some interesting shapes
Open devtools and add `html * { border-radius: 6px; }` to make this site look lovely.
Everything in the real world is rounded to some degree. If anything, it's more weird that boxes on a screen should be the exception.
With this reasoning even boxes on screen as rounded at some degree
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?
May I introduce you to Bismuth?
…which doesn’t look “natural” because of it’s crystals form close to 90 degree angles.
That's circular reasoning (which is ironic, given the subject at hand).
The point is that it’s rare to see it in nature, so our minds tend to think that they are not natural.
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.
<table><tr><td><img src="top-left-corner.gif" ....You're missing valign="top" in your TD
Border-radius makes it easier to implement rounded-rectangles, etc. compared to the tables-of-offset-image-sprites they needed back in the day.
That says nothing about whether rounded-rectangles are "good" or "bad" though.
Was that the 3x3 table method, or was that for earlier browsers?
Microsoft Metro Design fan?
I mean, the very bible of all things usability has redesigned its website and they put rounded corners almost everywhere.
You're right, they didn't use to have rounded corners: https://web.archive.org/web/20131201025758/http://www.nngrou...
That was when border-radius already existed.
Of course their older designs didn't have rounded corners because that would have required using images, which would have made the page load slowly: https://web.archive.org/web/19990222172600/http://www.nngrou...
But why
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?
We like border radius, because we were forced to.
If we’re going to fuck something, it should be something more consequential like JIRA.
How about somebody you love? Or at least find wildly attractive and can trust?
I wouldn't have the heart to subject them to Jira.
why is this flagged lmao
fuckexcessiveborderradius.com (I'm looking at you, macOS 26)