10 ms·

Why do we round corners?

115 points by openknot 5y ago

keithnz 5y ago
I was with them up until the diagram where the straight lines seemed much better. Not that it distracts from the main argument. It might just be that I expect straight lines on diagrams like that and not curves
- elromulous 5y ago
  +1 The straight line diagram is easier to read for me as well. While I sometimes enjoy curved lines for diagrams, I think the ones the author chose were too curvy for my taste.
  - gligorot 5y ago
    -1 from me then? I actually had a silent wow moment for that demonstration.
- ars 5y ago
  Same here - the rounded flowchart was much harder to read, with the rounded one my eyes got lost where the line split in half. The square rectangle pairing was also easier than the rounded one to match (there were fewer details to compare).
- wolpoli 5y ago
  It's also trivial example with 3 boxes. A more complex diagram with curved lines will start to look very inconsistent without a graphics designer cleaning things up.
- donatj 5y ago
  I thought the same exact thing. I feel like if anything, it obscures the implied relationship between B and C
  - systoll 5y ago
    I’d’ve gone the other way — the rounding makes clear that there is no direct link between b & c, where the orthogonal lines are suggestive of one. The orthogonal straight line diagrams create a phantom b-c connection whenever you connect a-b and a-c. Rounded diagrams can still have that b-c connection if it’s intended.
drewcoo 5y ago
How strange! I'm constantly complaining about how we build everything with these inhuman, objectionable square corners! And everyone seems to think I'm crazy (for that). So I assumed we were trained to love square corners. And the article offers no proof more compelling than my own anecdata. So I haven't changed my mind yet.
0x7E3 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  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.
  - 0x7E3 5y ago
    Yes, I agree with several of the points made in the article.
  - Beltalowda 5y ago
    I wonder how much of that is cultural; do people in China, India, Indonesia, Africa, etc. have the same perceptions and associations?
    - ketzo 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect
eps 5y ago
While lot of text about trivialities.
mauvehaus 5y ago
Because the siege engines will round them off anyway if we make them sharp and our castle ever comes under attack. And our defending archers can better rain arrows down on attackers approaching from any direction from a rounded tower.
- mcphage 5y ago
  Ah, but internal sharp angles are pretty good. Get a nice V to defend against attackers from 2 sides…
  - Cullinet 5y ago
  - pedrosorio 5y ago
    Yep, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Fortress_of_Almeida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Fortress_of_Almeida
    - InitialLastName 5y ago
      Worth noting that in addition to the ability of defenders to see every part of the wall, star forts have the advantage of making artillery fire more likely to hit the wall at an oblique angle, reducing the odds of a direct hit and (probabilistically) reducing the energy imparted to destroying the wall.
      - jessaustin 5y ago
        There's a trade-off: it takes much more masonry to enclose the same amount of space.
kazinator 5y ago
Rounded corners look more sturdy and robust. Objects with sharp angles are easier to break. External corners are easily damaged. Metal corner guards for cabinets are often rounded, and that makes them not only safer for people but also rugged. Internal corners concentrate stresses, making it easier to start a crack and break the object. Sharp corners are easy to produce, requiring less tooling, and so look cheap.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > Sharp corners are easy to produce, requiring less tooling, and so look cheap. An artifact of modernity, surely? Historically, tight, neat corners required large amounts of skill and the right tools to create, whereas there were many approaches to rounding-off an arbitrary corner or edge.
  - 8note 5y ago
    Since the advent of the milling machine, but it's been around for a long time down. I guess really it's from the age of the saw or file. Making sharp corners isn't particularly hard to do
    - JKCalhoun 5y ago
      Hard to maintain though. You can generally make a rounded edge/corner rounder, much harder to re-plane a whole surface to restore the edge.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Interesting. I think rounded is what sharp corners will look like over time. A woodworker takes a block plane and chamfers the edge of the furniture they are working on so that it isn't instantly dinged up within days of being in the buyer's home. At the same time then, a sharp-edged piece of furniture shows that either the material itself is extremely strong, resilient, or shows that the owner is fastidious in the care of their furniture. The sharp edge is perhaps a subtle status-symbol.
Cullinet 5y ago
because Jobs wanted everything to be zen so badly he put every window in a chord... I'll show myself out now...
Goety 5y ago
This might apply to the argument of cursive over print writing style
codevark 5y ago
nstart 5y ago
> Rounded corners also make effective content containers. This is because the rounded corners point inward towards the center of the rectangle. This puts the focus on the contents inside the rectangle. It also makes it easy to see which side belongs to which rectangle when two rectangles are next to each other. Personally, as a non designer and someone with close to zero natural aesthetic abilities, this single point is the one that resonates. There are some forum tools that used to choose to separate content threads by rectangles. When scrolling through a page quickly it was easy to miss where one thread started and the other finished. After the switch to rounded corners the distinction when moving fast became a lot easier to see.
- Cullinet 5y ago
  I just realised that I better not say how exactly but the ability to draw anything on the screen really does centre so many excellent ways of showing you the boundaries you want highlighted... which is your clue and solution right there what to do
- bbx 5y ago
  I agree. As a designer, this is the point that makes the most sense to me. Rounded corners allow easy content “attribution”, and provides a natural grouping pattern. Second would be how rounded corners on buttons or inputs helps distinguish the background and surroundings from the interactive part of the page.
DoreenMichele 5y ago
For airplanes, we round the window corners so the plane doesn't fall out of the sky like some Cthulhoid horror mysteriously tore it apart one day. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20435793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20435793
naikrovek 5y ago
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.
- MrLeap 5y ago
  A lot (all?) of design is signaling. You don't have a condition, you simply haven't been conditioned to reflexively shibboleth.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  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 way into your subconscious — cause a mild sense of unease for example. Designers, artists, I would argue are more in tune with that — maybe more sensitive to it?
  - naikrovek 5y ago
    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 representation of anything, and are now talking solely about explosions and flowers; concepts independent of media. oh but UX person wanted me to think that because an explosion is inherently less peaceful than a flower, that makes a picture of an explosion less peaceful than a picture of a flower? NOPE. totally separate things. try again, UX person. this is what confuses me. shapes are shapes and have no inherent feeling or opinion about anything. if you want to talk about the concept depicted by each shape then you're no longer talking about the shapes at all; you've left user-experience-ville. but UX people use a normal person's desire to couple the photograph itself and the subject in the photograph to say "round corners are better, here's a whole article about it" and normal people will (apparently) say things like "sharp corners are so much more jarring for my eyes and make it so much more difficult for light to pass through my pupils so obviously I'm on team round-corner." just feels like mental slight-of-hand, like someone is trying to trick me into agreeing. I mean look back at the toolbars on Windows applications from 20 years ago. those icons meant NOTHING (beyond the simple cut, copy and paste icons, really) and we all learned what each meant. and don't you dare try to tell me that a floppy disk icon naturally means "save" and definitely could not also mean "load" or even just "floppy disk" which is what it actually represents. you try depicting the concept of "saving a file to disk" on a button with enough room for a 16x16 image supporting 16 colors. shapes don't mean ANYTHING. they have no meaning or inherent ease of viewing at all. at best all you can do is hope users either memorize the shape-to-action relationship table or know how to show the tooltips. I say that UX people are crackpots, but I've worked with a few and they all seemed very sane and well-thought out folks, so I dunno. but then there's this article saying a sunburst shape is "harder to look at" than a circle shape and then it is hard to go anywhere other than going straight to "UX people are nuts!"
tejtm 5y ago
having just emerged from the metal shop with fingers the electronic print scanners can never recognize ... how is this even a question. also "stress risers" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_concentration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_concentration
perilunar 5y ago
How can you write an article on rounded corners without mentioning Steve Jobs and Bill Atkinson? https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_...
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  I'm "old", but I know that not every article about X has to be full history of X.
  - perilunar 5y ago
    Well sure, but the first sentence of the article is practically the title of Andy Hertzfeld's post. It would have been perfect for a link at least.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  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 allowed QuickDraw to draw ovals very quickly. Still blows my mind. I have a hankering to try to blind-rewrite this algorithm knowing only the above.
  - bobbylarrybobby 5y ago
    Were square roots really so slow that integer addition in a loop was faster??
    - the2and7 5y ago
      68000 processor on the Mac didn't support floating point operations.
    - 5y ago
NoPicklez 5y ago
The "We are conditioned for round corners" was a bit far-fetched in terms of how it relates to design in my opinion. As the article asks the reader to think about its purpose, agreeing that there is a place for sharp edges. I wouldn't let my child play with a fork, but I wouldn't let them eat their dinner with a ball either?
dbodin11 5y ago
[dead]
taf2 5y ago
Funny last week we removed all the rounded corners. We set a border css variable so all the border rules became border-radius: var(--border-size); We figured this way every 6 months or so we could switch between squares and rounded edges... This may provide little design pops to give a fresh feeling to users... we'll see so far it feels very fresh to me.
- toiletfuneral 5y ago
- _carbyau_ 5y ago
  Automate rounding by month number and then forget about it. Watch as the new year brings in the freshness!
dheera 5y ago
On the other hand I have a deep hate for things rounded in 3 dimensions for physical objects. They look cheap. Round in 2 but not 3 dimensions. 3 dimensions: https://www.macworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/iphone-se-2020-100838688-orig.jpg?quality=50&strip=all https://www.macworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/iphone-s... 2 dimensions: https://4.img-dpreview.com/files/p/articles/2759540226/Apple_announce-iphone12pro_10132020.jpeg https://4.img-dpreview.com/files/p/articles/2759540226/Apple...
- 8note 5y ago
  You still want fillets or chamfers in 3d. Properly sharp edges in any dimension will still hurt you and catch on things
  - dheera 5y ago
    yeah the chamfers I'll give you that, wasn't counting those
- alisonkisk 5y ago
travisgriggs 5y ago
A few months ago, I built matching houseframe beds for my 2 year old grandtwins (https://www.woodshopdiaries.com/diy-kids-house-bed/ https://www.woodshopdiaries.com/diy-kids-house-bed/). The best piece of advice I got from my dad before I started on this (for me) ambitious project was in question form: "Are you going round over all the edges? A 1/2 inch round leaves a bruise on a little one. An unfinished edge leaves a cut." He's been right. They're psycho 2 year olds who think monkey behavior is the best. I've watched them bonk multiple times on facetime. No cuts, just a rub at the bonk spot. We see this in product design all around us. Sharp corners cuts and hurts us. So we tend to round things over. And when we use software interfaces, I think the rounded corners engender a "this is safer" sub emotional response, and therefor more approachable.
- mc32 5y ago
  When I buy PC cases, I prefer the ones whose sheetmetal edges are rounded and not sharp. The sharp edged ones are knuckle cutters.
- mauvehaus 5y ago
  I hate to be that guy, but this is all but guaranteed to have problems with wood movement in the long term. Briefly: boards get wider and narrower as they absorb and release moisture from the air, respectively. The length remains constant. Anywhere you have a wide board (or glued up panel) affixed cross grain to another piece, you need to account for wood movement. The problematic joint in this case is where the side panels run into the posts that form the corners and support the "roof". Best case is that your grandkids live in an area with extremely constant humidity and nothing bad happens. In any other case, those wide panels are going to get wider and narrower as the seasons change and you'll either split a panel or the Kreg screws will work loose over time. Traditionally, there are a couple of ways of dealing with this. If you're doing mortise and tenon construction, you'd have multiple mortise and tenon joints along the width of the panel/length of the post. Only one is fitted tightly and glued. The remainder are left unglued and loose along the length of the post to allow the panel to grow and shrink in width. Table tops are traditionally joined to table bases using table buttons. Modern figure eight hardware or elongated screw holes are other equally valid options. On the subject of rounding corners, I try to avoid a super aggressive rounding for most furniture. I agree with your dad that this is a great place to put a heavy round over. Those beds are going to be a fort, jungle gym, and probably space ship over time. For anything that isn't going to be used quite so hard (bookshelves, for instance), I usually consider whether the client has kids or not when I'm deciding how much to break the edges. If there aren't kids, I shoot for my old boss's standard of "looks hard, but feels soft", if there are kids, I break them a little more aggressively than that, as much for the preservation of the furniture as the children. Sharp corners wear pretty poorly, and a little extra softening helps keep the finish and wood in better shape over time at the cost of some initial crispness. Anyhow, I hope the grandkids love the beds, and that everything works out without things loosening up over time. Just the same, maybe give them a little shake next time you visit to make sure :-)
jdrc 5y ago
Because Apple did it. Rounded corners is 50s design and was considered kitsch, but once it became associated with the privilege of owning an idevice it became ubiquitous and impossible to quit. I am one of those who has gotten sick of them
- alisonkisk 5y ago
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Apple did it in 1983 (Lisa). Oddly, Jobs' next venture, NeXT, went with a sharp-cornered rectangular UI. I guess I still prefer the former to the latter.
foxes 5y ago
The corner in that picture looks absolutely disgusting, you can see the discontinuity. I would rather have a square corner if you are not going to bother to round them properly. The way to actually produce rounded squares is to fix the curvature, and then solve for a corresponding curve. You want at least a differentiable function for the curvature. Something with a bit of a spike (think of a Gaussian, but make it level off to flat after the spikes). From the curvature you can use something like the Frenet–Serret formula, integrate and find a formula for a curve. You then approximate it with a bunch of bezier curves. Should get something nice and smooth.
megous 5y ago
You round corners because that's what other designers started doing since Windows xp/vista times. The rest just seem like rationalizations. Just go to any website and run: document.querySelectorAll('*').forEach(_ => _.style.borderRadius = 0); You'll barely even notice the change. I just tried it on all my most favorite websites. No change in "feelings". The reason probably being the other UI fad, which is to make everything so lacking in contrast, that it's hard to discern the difference between round/sharp corners, even if you focus on it.
tigerlily 5y ago
For my feeling, I find bevels provide me with the greatest relief.
mdoms 5y ago
In 3 years someone will post an almost identical article with a bunch of wishy washy points about why sharp edges are easier to look at and easier to read. None of this is meaningful, it's just fashion. Tide comes in, tide goes out.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Still waiting for brushed metal to come back. Tide goes out, tide stays out?
Brajeshwar 5y ago
I have some sweet memories of rounded corners in HTML/CSS from my early days in Development. Rounded corners were nice, subtle, and pleases the eye but it was hard before CSS supported it. The idea was to use Photoshop to round the corners and "slice" those elements and used them as background images in CSS. In Photoshop, one has to know the trick to "feather" (I hope I'm using the right term) the corners for a smoothly rounded corner, else you get pixelated ones. This happens pretty often and is a monotonous boring task after a while for the team. My team and I created a 9-Splicer tool in Flash, wrapped in a Windows Program (forgotten the name of the paid tool). Now any front-end developer could use different styles of rounded corners from the varieties of rounded corner graphics that the designer creates in her spare time.
- spicybright 5y ago
  Oh man, that dug up some memories :) Anyone remember doing this? -webkit-border-radius: 5px; -moz-border-radius:5px; -khtml-border-radius:5px; border-radius: 5px;
_8j50 5y ago
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 sharp cornered as well.
- pinephoneguy 5y ago
  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.
  - watersb 5y ago
    Well, yes, that was the point of the round rects in Macintosh 1984 design: change the perception of what a "computer" feels like. The rich, Corinthian leather in later Mac design... sigh. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corinthian_leather https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corinthian_leather https://www.cultofmac.com/189707/steve-jobs-himself-is-responsible-for-calendar-and-game-centers-hideous-skeuomorphic-designs/ https://www.cultofmac.com/189707/steve-jobs-himself-is-respo...
- talaketu 5y ago
  "round corners feel natural" is no better explanation than "round corners are smoother".
  - Barrin92 5y ago
    It's a pretty reasonable explanation for why they're popular. Something that looks artificial looks out of place and doesn't blend. It's aesthetically unpleasing. Just take a haircut. There's a reason rounded shapes on a beard or a hairline look better than cutting a 90 degree angle into your head which makes you look like Minecraft Steve. 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.
notriddle 5y ago
A rounded corners article with no squircle? https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Squircle.html https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Squircle.html
jasfi 5y ago
It's really just a preference. We also tend to like things that are different from what we're bored of, so square/round corners can be a fad. I always felt that's why Microsoft changed their UI design back and forth.
voldacar 5y ago
My brain has come to associate rounded corners with software / websites that: - present insufficient information on my screen and generally waste pixels - do not have settings - have poor performance, with every click taking 300+ms to do anything
- deleted 5y ago
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yoyopa 5y ago
because it can look cool. this site back in the day was one my earliest recollections with rounded corners, after the mac os https://web.archive.org/web/20010418154702/http://www.glideunderground.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010418154702/http://www.glideu...
aaronchall 5y ago
Comparing a font using all caps with a font using lowercase isn't a fair comparison, we know that all caps is harder to read (source: some paper at some point as an undergrad when I had no bibliographic database - and my own experience). I agree with the comments that see no real benefit to the rounded corners except for the one comment I read that points out that we see sharper corners as more fragile. I think there may be some sunk-cost bias here - if you spent a lot of time and energy making rounded corners at a time when CSS didn't make it easy, now you'll have quite a bit of cognitive dissonance concluding that rounded corners are no better than sharp ones.
alpb 5y ago
One major reason that seems unattributed is that with the Web 2.0 movement around late 2000s we started to round most elements (buttons, div containers, input boxes...) in web design.
pleb_nz 5y ago
I must be different as I prefer diagrams with square cornered lines. 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.
richardw 5y ago
Author links articles they were inspired by at the bottom. That’s fantastic and we should all do that.
albert_e 5y ago
My take -- curious to know counter points or alternate thoughts: 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.
nyxf 5y ago
Okay, I dont know how to feel about this but. This seems to be a literally rehashing of an article from 2011. It even begins with the same damn text intro. Attaching links for reference. this article: ``` Rounded corners — they’re everywhere. From software user interfaces to hardware product design, there is something intrinsically satisfying about the look and feel of a rounded corner. In fact, designers have been using them so much that they became an industry standard rather than a design trend. But why are rounded corners so popular? ``` The article from 2011 ``` Designers use rounded corners so much today that they’re more of an industry standard than a design trend. Not only are they found on software user interfaces, but hardware product designs as well. So what is it about rounded corners that make them so popular? Indeed they look appealing, but there’s more to it than that. ``` What do you think about this, HN? Link for ref: https://uxmovement.com/thinking/why-rounded-corners-are-easier-on-the-eyes/ https://uxmovement.com/thinking/why-rounded-corners-are-easi...
- chias 5y ago
  I think it looks like plagiarism. You can't just write "The following examples are taken from this great [other article]" and then proceed to copy the entire other article, swapping synonyms like you're in 9th grade and forgot about your history report until the night before.
- deleted 5y ago
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- oarabbus_ 5y ago
  >What do you think about this, HN? Pretty egregious and disingenuous article IMO. Even the captions to the pictures are the same. The only way I'd consider this even _remotely_ acceptable is if it began with an into stating "printed with permission from user 'Anthony' at uxmovement.com" or something of the sort.
- Boltgolt 5y ago
  Anyone reading this really needs to take a look at the articles side by side, this is extremely blatant plagiarism. They couldn't even be bothered to pick different objects for the ball and the fork
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bamboozled 5y ago
Because round corners look more natural to humans, the natural word produces almost nothing that is a perfect right angle (which we can easily see with the naked eye), so soft corners a more familiar to us and less artificial.
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flohofwoe 5y ago
> there is something intrinsically satisfying... No, there's something "intrinsically" old-fashioned about round corners. Windows XP had round corners. But I guess I'm just not in tune with the UI fashion cycle, in 5 years, pointed corners will be the next big thing again, along with enthusiastic blog posts from UI designers about how "intrinsically satisfying" those pointed corners are.

115 points by openknot 5y ago

I was with them up until the diagram where the straight lines seemed much better. Not that it distracts from the main argument. It might just be that I expect straight lines on diagrams like that and not curves

elromulous 5y ago
+1 The straight line diagram is easier to read for me as well. While I sometimes enjoy curved lines for diagrams, I think the ones the author chose were too curvy for my taste.
- gligorot 5y ago
  -1 from me then? I actually had a silent wow moment for that demonstration.
ars 5y ago
Same here - the rounded flowchart was much harder to read, with the rounded one my eyes got lost where the line split in half. The square rectangle pairing was also easier than the rounded one to match (there were fewer details to compare).
wolpoli 5y ago
It's also trivial example with 3 boxes. A more complex diagram with curved lines will start to look very inconsistent without a graphics designer cleaning things up.
donatj 5y ago
I thought the same exact thing. I feel like if anything, it obscures the implied relationship between B and C
- systoll 5y ago
  I’d’ve gone the other way — the rounding makes clear that there is no direct link between b & c, where the orthogonal lines are suggestive of one. The orthogonal straight line diagrams create a phantom b-c connection whenever you connect a-b and a-c. Rounded diagrams can still have that b-c connection if it’s intended.

drewcoo 5y ago

How strange! I'm constantly complaining about how we build everything with these inhuman, objectionable square corners! And everyone seems to think I'm crazy (for that). So I assumed we were trained to love square corners. And the article offers no proof more compelling than my own anecdata. So I haven't changed my mind yet.

0x7E3 5y ago

> 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 5y ago
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.
- 0x7E3 5y ago
  Yes, I agree with several of the points made in the article.
- Beltalowda 5y ago
  I wonder how much of that is cultural; do people in China, India, Indonesia, Africa, etc. have the same perceptions and associations?
  - ketzo 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

eps 5y ago

While lot of text about trivialities.

mauvehaus 5y ago

Because the siege engines will round them off anyway if we make them sharp and our castle ever comes under attack. And our defending archers can better rain arrows down on attackers approaching from any direction from a rounded tower.

mcphage 5y ago
Ah, but internal sharp angles are pretty good. Get a nice V to defend against attackers from 2 sides…
- Cullinet 5y ago
- pedrosorio 5y ago
  Yep, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Fortress_of_Almeida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Fortress_of_Almeida
  - InitialLastName 5y ago
    Worth noting that in addition to the ability of defenders to see every part of the wall, star forts have the advantage of making artillery fire more likely to hit the wall at an oblique angle, reducing the odds of a direct hit and (probabilistically) reducing the energy imparted to destroying the wall.
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      There's a trade-off: it takes much more masonry to enclose the same amount of space.

kazinator 5y ago

Rounded corners look more sturdy and robust. Objects with sharp angles are easier to break. External corners are easily damaged. Metal corner guards for cabinets are often rounded, and that makes them not only safer for people but also rugged. Internal corners concentrate stresses, making it easier to start a crack and break the object. Sharp corners are easy to produce, requiring less tooling, and so look cheap.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
> Sharp corners are easy to produce, requiring less tooling, and so look cheap. An artifact of modernity, surely? Historically, tight, neat corners required large amounts of skill and the right tools to create, whereas there were many approaches to rounding-off an arbitrary corner or edge.
- 8note 5y ago
  Since the advent of the milling machine, but it's been around for a long time down. I guess really it's from the age of the saw or file. Making sharp corners isn't particularly hard to do
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    Hard to maintain though. You can generally make a rounded edge/corner rounder, much harder to re-plane a whole surface to restore the edge.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
Interesting. I think rounded is what sharp corners will look like over time. A woodworker takes a block plane and chamfers the edge of the furniture they are working on so that it isn't instantly dinged up within days of being in the buyer's home. At the same time then, a sharp-edged piece of furniture shows that either the material itself is extremely strong, resilient, or shows that the owner is fastidious in the care of their furniture. The sharp edge is perhaps a subtle status-symbol.

Cullinet 5y ago

because Jobs wanted everything to be zen so badly he put every window in a chord... I'll show myself out now...

Goety 5y ago

This might apply to the argument of cursive over print writing style

codevark 5y ago

nstart 5y ago

> Rounded corners also make effective content containers. This is because the rounded corners point inward towards the center of the rectangle. This puts the focus on the contents inside the rectangle. It also makes it easy to see which side belongs to which rectangle when two rectangles are next to each other. Personally, as a non designer and someone with close to zero natural aesthetic abilities, this single point is the one that resonates. There are some forum tools that used to choose to separate content threads by rectangles. When scrolling through a page quickly it was easy to miss where one thread started and the other finished. After the switch to rounded corners the distinction when moving fast became a lot easier to see.

Cullinet 5y ago
I just realised that I better not say how exactly but the ability to draw anything on the screen really does centre so many excellent ways of showing you the boundaries you want highlighted... which is your clue and solution right there what to do
bbx 5y ago
I agree. As a designer, this is the point that makes the most sense to me. Rounded corners allow easy content “attribution”, and provides a natural grouping pattern. Second would be how rounded corners on buttons or inputs helps distinguish the background and surroundings from the interactive part of the page.

DoreenMichele 5y ago

For airplanes, we round the window corners so the plane doesn't fall out of the sky like some Cthulhoid horror mysteriously tore it apart one day. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20435793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20435793

naikrovek 5y ago

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.

MrLeap 5y ago
A lot (all?) of design is signaling. You don't have a condition, you simply haven't been conditioned to reflexively shibboleth.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
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 way into your subconscious — cause a mild sense of unease for example. Designers, artists, I would argue are more in tune with that — maybe more sensitive to it?
- naikrovek 5y ago
  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 representation of anything, and are now talking solely about explosions and flowers; concepts independent of media. oh but UX person wanted me to think that because an explosion is inherently less peaceful than a flower, that makes a picture of an explosion less peaceful than a picture of a flower? NOPE. totally separate things. try again, UX person. this is what confuses me. shapes are shapes and have no inherent feeling or opinion about anything. if you want to talk about the concept depicted by each shape then you're no longer talking about the shapes at all; you've left user-experience-ville. but UX people use a normal person's desire to couple the photograph itself and the subject in the photograph to say "round corners are better, here's a whole article about it" and normal people will (apparently) say things like "sharp corners are so much more jarring for my eyes and make it so much more difficult for light to pass through my pupils so obviously I'm on team round-corner." just feels like mental slight-of-hand, like someone is trying to trick me into agreeing. I mean look back at the toolbars on Windows applications from 20 years ago. those icons meant NOTHING (beyond the simple cut, copy and paste icons, really) and we all learned what each meant. and don't you dare try to tell me that a floppy disk icon naturally means "save" and definitely could not also mean "load" or even just "floppy disk" which is what it actually represents. you try depicting the concept of "saving a file to disk" on a button with enough room for a 16x16 image supporting 16 colors. shapes don't mean ANYTHING. they have no meaning or inherent ease of viewing at all. at best all you can do is hope users either memorize the shape-to-action relationship table or know how to show the tooltips. I say that UX people are crackpots, but I've worked with a few and they all seemed very sane and well-thought out folks, so I dunno. but then there's this article saying a sunburst shape is "harder to look at" than a circle shape and then it is hard to go anywhere other than going straight to "UX people are nuts!"

tejtm 5y ago

having just emerged from the metal shop with fingers the electronic print scanners can never recognize ... how is this even a question. also "stress risers" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_concentration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_concentration

perilunar 5y ago

How can you write an article on rounded corners without mentioning Steve Jobs and Bill Atkinson? https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_Everywhere.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_...

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
I'm "old", but I know that not every article about X has to be full history of X.
- perilunar 5y ago
  Well sure, but the first sentence of the article is practically the title of Andy Hertzfeld's post. It would have been perfect for a link at least.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
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 allowed QuickDraw to draw ovals very quickly. Still blows my mind. I have a hankering to try to blind-rewrite this algorithm knowing only the above.
- bobbylarrybobby 5y ago
  Were square roots really so slow that integer addition in a loop was faster??
  - the2and7 5y ago
    68000 processor on the Mac didn't support floating point operations.
  - 5y ago

NoPicklez 5y ago

The "We are conditioned for round corners" was a bit far-fetched in terms of how it relates to design in my opinion. As the article asks the reader to think about its purpose, agreeing that there is a place for sharp edges. I wouldn't let my child play with a fork, but I wouldn't let them eat their dinner with a ball either?

dbodin11 5y ago

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taf2 5y ago

Funny last week we removed all the rounded corners. We set a border css variable so all the border rules became border-radius: var(--border-size); We figured this way every 6 months or so we could switch between squares and rounded edges... This may provide little design pops to give a fresh feeling to users... we'll see so far it feels very fresh to me.

toiletfuneral 5y ago
_carbyau_ 5y ago
Automate rounding by month number and then forget about it. Watch as the new year brings in the freshness!

dheera 5y ago

On the other hand I have a deep hate for things rounded in 3 dimensions for physical objects. They look cheap. Round in 2 but not 3 dimensions. 3 dimensions: https://www.macworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/iphone-se-2020-100838688-orig.jpg?quality=50&strip=all https://www.macworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/iphone-s... 2 dimensions: https://4.img-dpreview.com/files/p/articles/2759540226/Apple_announce-iphone12pro_10132020.jpeg https://4.img-dpreview.com/files/p/articles/2759540226/Apple...

8note 5y ago
You still want fillets or chamfers in 3d. Properly sharp edges in any dimension will still hurt you and catch on things
- dheera 5y ago
  yeah the chamfers I'll give you that, wasn't counting those
alisonkisk 5y ago

travisgriggs 5y ago

A few months ago, I built matching houseframe beds for my 2 year old grandtwins (https://www.woodshopdiaries.com/diy-kids-house-bed/ https://www.woodshopdiaries.com/diy-kids-house-bed/). The best piece of advice I got from my dad before I started on this (for me) ambitious project was in question form: "Are you going round over all the edges? A 1/2 inch round leaves a bruise on a little one. An unfinished edge leaves a cut." He's been right. They're psycho 2 year olds who think monkey behavior is the best. I've watched them bonk multiple times on facetime. No cuts, just a rub at the bonk spot. We see this in product design all around us. Sharp corners cuts and hurts us. So we tend to round things over. And when we use software interfaces, I think the rounded corners engender a "this is safer" sub emotional response, and therefor more approachable.

mc32 5y ago
When I buy PC cases, I prefer the ones whose sheetmetal edges are rounded and not sharp. The sharp edged ones are knuckle cutters.
mauvehaus 5y ago
I hate to be that guy, but this is all but guaranteed to have problems with wood movement in the long term. Briefly: boards get wider and narrower as they absorb and release moisture from the air, respectively. The length remains constant. Anywhere you have a wide board (or glued up panel) affixed cross grain to another piece, you need to account for wood movement. The problematic joint in this case is where the side panels run into the posts that form the corners and support the "roof". Best case is that your grandkids live in an area with extremely constant humidity and nothing bad happens. In any other case, those wide panels are going to get wider and narrower as the seasons change and you'll either split a panel or the Kreg screws will work loose over time. Traditionally, there are a couple of ways of dealing with this. If you're doing mortise and tenon construction, you'd have multiple mortise and tenon joints along the width of the panel/length of the post. Only one is fitted tightly and glued. The remainder are left unglued and loose along the length of the post to allow the panel to grow and shrink in width. Table tops are traditionally joined to table bases using table buttons. Modern figure eight hardware or elongated screw holes are other equally valid options. On the subject of rounding corners, I try to avoid a super aggressive rounding for most furniture. I agree with your dad that this is a great place to put a heavy round over. Those beds are going to be a fort, jungle gym, and probably space ship over time. For anything that isn't going to be used quite so hard (bookshelves, for instance), I usually consider whether the client has kids or not when I'm deciding how much to break the edges. If there aren't kids, I shoot for my old boss's standard of "looks hard, but feels soft", if there are kids, I break them a little more aggressively than that, as much for the preservation of the furniture as the children. Sharp corners wear pretty poorly, and a little extra softening helps keep the finish and wood in better shape over time at the cost of some initial crispness. Anyhow, I hope the grandkids love the beds, and that everything works out without things loosening up over time. Just the same, maybe give them a little shake next time you visit to make sure :-)

jdrc 5y ago

Because Apple did it. Rounded corners is 50s design and was considered kitsch, but once it became associated with the privilege of owning an idevice it became ubiquitous and impossible to quit. I am one of those who has gotten sick of them

alisonkisk 5y ago
JKCalhoun 5y ago
Apple did it in 1983 (Lisa). Oddly, Jobs' next venture, NeXT, went with a sharp-cornered rectangular UI. I guess I still prefer the former to the latter.

foxes 5y ago

The corner in that picture looks absolutely disgusting, you can see the discontinuity. I would rather have a square corner if you are not going to bother to round them properly. The way to actually produce rounded squares is to fix the curvature, and then solve for a corresponding curve. You want at least a differentiable function for the curvature. Something with a bit of a spike (think of a Gaussian, but make it level off to flat after the spikes). From the curvature you can use something like the Frenet–Serret formula, integrate and find a formula for a curve. You then approximate it with a bunch of bezier curves. Should get something nice and smooth.

megous 5y ago

You round corners because that's what other designers started doing since Windows xp/vista times. The rest just seem like rationalizations. Just go to any website and run: document.querySelectorAll('*').forEach(_ => _.style.borderRadius = 0); You'll barely even notice the change. I just tried it on all my most favorite websites. No change in "feelings". The reason probably being the other UI fad, which is to make everything so lacking in contrast, that it's hard to discern the difference between round/sharp corners, even if you focus on it.

tigerlily 5y ago

For my feeling, I find bevels provide me with the greatest relief.

mdoms 5y ago

In 3 years someone will post an almost identical article with a bunch of wishy washy points about why sharp edges are easier to look at and easier to read. None of this is meaningful, it's just fashion. Tide comes in, tide goes out.

JKCalhoun 5y ago
Still waiting for brushed metal to come back. Tide goes out, tide stays out?

Brajeshwar 5y ago

I have some sweet memories of rounded corners in HTML/CSS from my early days in Development. Rounded corners were nice, subtle, and pleases the eye but it was hard before CSS supported it. The idea was to use Photoshop to round the corners and "slice" those elements and used them as background images in CSS. In Photoshop, one has to know the trick to "feather" (I hope I'm using the right term) the corners for a smoothly rounded corner, else you get pixelated ones. This happens pretty often and is a monotonous boring task after a while for the team. My team and I created a 9-Splicer tool in Flash, wrapped in a Windows Program (forgotten the name of the paid tool). Now any front-end developer could use different styles of rounded corners from the varieties of rounded corner graphics that the designer creates in her spare time.

spicybright 5y ago
Oh man, that dug up some memories :) Anyone remember doing this? -webkit-border-radius: 5px; -moz-border-radius:5px; -khtml-border-radius:5px; border-radius: 5px;

_8j50 5y ago

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 sharp cornered as well.

pinephoneguy 5y ago
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.
- watersb 5y ago
  Well, yes, that was the point of the round rects in Macintosh 1984 design: change the perception of what a "computer" feels like. The rich, Corinthian leather in later Mac design... sigh. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corinthian_leather https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corinthian_leather https://www.cultofmac.com/189707/steve-jobs-himself-is-responsible-for-calendar-and-game-centers-hideous-skeuomorphic-designs/ https://www.cultofmac.com/189707/steve-jobs-himself-is-respo...
talaketu 5y ago
"round corners feel natural" is no better explanation than "round corners are smoother".
- Barrin92 5y ago
  It's a pretty reasonable explanation for why they're popular. Something that looks artificial looks out of place and doesn't blend. It's aesthetically unpleasing. Just take a haircut. There's a reason rounded shapes on a beard or a hairline look better than cutting a 90 degree angle into your head which makes you look like Minecraft Steve. 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.

notriddle 5y ago

A rounded corners article with no squircle? https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Squircle.html https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Squircle.html

jasfi 5y ago

It's really just a preference. We also tend to like things that are different from what we're bored of, so square/round corners can be a fad. I always felt that's why Microsoft changed their UI design back and forth.

voldacar 5y ago

My brain has come to associate rounded corners with software / websites that: - present insufficient information on my screen and generally waste pixels - do not have settings - have poor performance, with every click taking 300+ms to do anything

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yoyopa 5y ago

because it can look cool. this site back in the day was one my earliest recollections with rounded corners, after the mac os https://web.archive.org/web/20010418154702/http://www.glideunderground.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20010418154702/http://www.glideu...

aaronchall 5y ago

Comparing a font using all caps with a font using lowercase isn't a fair comparison, we know that all caps is harder to read (source: some paper at some point as an undergrad when I had no bibliographic database - and my own experience). I agree with the comments that see no real benefit to the rounded corners except for the one comment I read that points out that we see sharper corners as more fragile. I think there may be some sunk-cost bias here - if you spent a lot of time and energy making rounded corners at a time when CSS didn't make it easy, now you'll have quite a bit of cognitive dissonance concluding that rounded corners are no better than sharp ones.

alpb 5y ago

One major reason that seems unattributed is that with the Web 2.0 movement around late 2000s we started to round most elements (buttons, div containers, input boxes...) in web design.

pleb_nz 5y ago

I must be different as I prefer diagrams with square cornered lines. 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.

richardw 5y ago

Author links articles they were inspired by at the bottom. That’s fantastic and we should all do that.

albert_e 5y ago

My take -- curious to know counter points or alternate thoughts: 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.

nyxf 5y ago

Okay, I dont know how to feel about this but. This seems to be a literally rehashing of an article from 2011. It even begins with the same damn text intro. Attaching links for reference. this article: ``` Rounded corners — they’re everywhere. From software user interfaces to hardware product design, there is something intrinsically satisfying about the look and feel of a rounded corner. In fact, designers have been using them so much that they became an industry standard rather than a design trend. But why are rounded corners so popular? ``` The article from 2011 ``` Designers use rounded corners so much today that they’re more of an industry standard than a design trend. Not only are they found on software user interfaces, but hardware product designs as well. So what is it about rounded corners that make them so popular? Indeed they look appealing, but there’s more to it than that. ``` What do you think about this, HN? Link for ref: https://uxmovement.com/thinking/why-rounded-corners-are-easier-on-the-eyes/ https://uxmovement.com/thinking/why-rounded-corners-are-easi...

chias 5y ago
I think it looks like plagiarism. You can't just write "The following examples are taken from this great [other article]" and then proceed to copy the entire other article, swapping synonyms like you're in 9th grade and forgot about your history report until the night before.
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oarabbus_ 5y ago
>What do you think about this, HN? Pretty egregious and disingenuous article IMO. Even the captions to the pictures are the same. The only way I'd consider this even _remotely_ acceptable is if it began with an into stating "printed with permission from user 'Anthony' at uxmovement.com" or something of the sort.
Boltgolt 5y ago
Anyone reading this really needs to take a look at the articles side by side, this is extremely blatant plagiarism. They couldn't even be bothered to pick different objects for the ball and the fork

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bamboozled 5y ago

Because round corners look more natural to humans, the natural word produces almost nothing that is a perfect right angle (which we can easily see with the naked eye), so soft corners a more familiar to us and less artificial.

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flohofwoe 5y ago

> there is something intrinsically satisfying... No, there's something "intrinsically" old-fashioned about round corners. Windows XP had round corners. But I guess I'm just not in tune with the UI fashion cycle, in 5 years, pointed corners will be the next big thing again, along with enthusiastic blog posts from UI designers about how "intrinsically satisfying" those pointed corners are.