Hacker News Reader

Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

Rounded corners! Radius on buttons (“Pills”) started its journey in 2018 and it spread like a plague.

Not every change is based on stylistic fads alone. Rounded corners on elements can increase the ability of users to recognize them and separate them from other elements, because visually the borders are less likely to be confused with other UI elements (lower cognitive load).

This article quotes a researcher on this topic:

> A rectangle with sharp edges takes indeed a little bit more cognitive visible effort than for example an ellipse of the same size. Our ‘fovea-eye’ is even faster in recording a circle. Edges involve additional neuronal image tools. The process is therefore slowed down.¹

1: https://designmodo.com/rounded-corners/

Mark my words - there is going to be a reverse trend, say 5-10 years from now. Same with color gradients, it will become uncool. It's all fashion.

> sharp edges takes indeed a little bit more cognitive visible effort

I have my doubts about this. It is 100% fad IMO.

Like how Windows slowly removed colors from it's icons, until they almost became black and white, only to reintroduce color back in Windows 11.

And how Windows 11 lists rounded windows and corners as a "signature feature"!

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/signatu...

And they still managed to get the round corners wrong, apparently. According to that page, the radius values are hardcoded in pixels, so they don't scale with the display's DPI setting.

That's at least a decade after the W3C had a well-developed concept of relative units for use with the CSS:

https://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/units.html#future (2010)

Thus, with a sufficiently high DPI display, you're going to miss out on one of Windows 11's "signature experiences" and end up with "legacy" squarish corners instead.

They use "effective pixels", just like CSS pixels are not actual pixels:

> Because of how the scaling system works, when you design your UWP app, you're designing in effective pixels, not actual physical pixels. Effective pixels (epx) are a virtual unit of measurement, and they're used to express layout dimensions and spacing, independent of screen density. (In our guidelines, epx, ep, and px are used interchangeably.)

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/layout/...

Also, Windows scales the pixel size when you use a legacy application (non DPI aware) on high DPI displays.

I just updated to Android 12 and the new border-radius on nearly every UI element is beyond absurd. It actually looks like someone just discovered that CSS property, and instead of being told by a designer "that looks goofy and childlike, tone it down," they doubled the value and put it on even more elements.

My notifications pull-down fits about 3 useful notifications. The rest is whitespace and rounded corners 4 layers deep. It's horrible.

Pill-shaped buttons were part of the Aqua theme in the original release of OS X. For a long time after that, UIs aped Aqua with pinstripes and jelly-shaded pills and while the pinstripes and jelly have gone, I think the pills are here to stay for some styles.

Yeah but there was a huge push just last year, basically every single SaaS app to Firefox, everyone folded. During the Aqua days, every company had their own unique take on design. Today, it is a design monoculture driven by the types of Stripe and Apple.

Design used to be a differentiating feature. Everything looks the same today. Kind of a Big Tech dystopia, even in design.

As the owner of an ultrawide...so much whitespace.

My point was, a lot of UI followed or was heavily inspired by whatever Apple was doing even then. These days, there's more Google in the mix.

Before pill buttons, they were gray beveled rounded rectangles, be it native or web, on every platform.

I don't view now as being especially dominated by sameness versus the past.

It was already there 10 years earlier in OpenLook.

Aqua - the "lickable" theme. I miss it, I prefer it to the current washed out MacOS where I cant tell what is what.

Don’t forget gradients for everything.

Going even further back, the tacky wild fractal wallpaper backgrounds on websites with animated gif “under construction” banners on top.

Give it 5 years and iOS and android will get some visual refresh that makes the current stuff look very dated.

Fashion is constantly changing and being revisited. It’s just the way it is. Something about it is what makes humans what they are. We love it…

Corporate Memphis!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com