Back to Home11/13/2025, 10:46:26 AM

fuckborderradius.com

helloplanets

26 points

35 comments

Mood

thoughtful

Sentiment

mixed

Discussion Activity

Very active discussion

First comment

23m

Peak period

Day 1

Avg / period

Comment distribution35 data points

Based on 35 loaded comments

Key moments

01Story posted
11/13/2025, 10:46:26 AM
5d ago
Step 01
02First comment
11/13/2025, 11:09:42 AM
23m after posting
Step 02
03Peak activity
35 comments in Day 1
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03
04Latest activity
11/13/2025, 9:56:46 PM
5d ago
Step 04

Generating AI Summary...

Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns

Discussion (35 comments)

Showing 35 comments

marginalia_nu

5d ago

2 replies

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.

pointlessone

5d ago

You might be delighted to learn that upcoming `corner-shape` is fixing that.

Also you still can use your sliced images with `border-image`.

wincy

5d ago

You can use negative border radius to get some interesting shapes

lifthrasiir

5d ago

1 reply

Apparently made by Twitter handle @getifyX: https://x.com/getifyX/status/1935001870658851288

nrhrjrjrjtntbt

5d ago

1 reply

Non walled: https://xcancel.com/getifyX/status/1935001870658851288

kragen

5d ago

Much appreciated!

yakshaving_jgt

5d ago

1 reply

If we’re going to fuck something, it should be something more consequential like JIRA.

https://ifuckinghatejira.com/

kragen

5d ago

1 reply

How about somebody you love? Or at least find wildly attractive and can trust?

yakshaving_jgt

5d ago

I wouldn't have the heart to subject them to Jira.

viraptor

5d ago

1 reply

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.

kragen

5d ago

1 reply

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.

chriswarbo

5d ago

1 reply

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!

kragen

5d ago

Bevels are indeed very helpful for that. Mystery-meat navigation has been a UI design problem for a long time.

_kush

5d ago

3 replies

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.

viraptor

5d ago

1 reply

   <table><tr><td><img src="top-left-corner.gif" ....

slater

5d ago

You're missing valign="top" in your TD

arscan

5d ago

Was that the 3x3 table method, or was that for earlier browsers?

chriswarbo

5d ago

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.

jstummbillig

5d ago

1 reply

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.

kyriakos

5d ago

With this reasoning even boxes on screen as rounded at some degree

Gualdrapo

5d ago

1 reply

I mean, the very bible of all things usability has redesigned its website and they put rounded corners almost everywhere.

https://www.nngroup.com/

kragen

5d ago

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...

solatic

5d ago

1 reply

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?

OisinMoran

5d ago

1 reply

May I introduce you to Bismuth?

kcplate

5d ago

1 reply

…which doesn’t look “natural” because of it’s crystals form close to 90 degree angles.

chriswarbo

5d ago

1 reply

That's circular reasoning (which is ironic, given the subject at hand).

kcplate

5d ago

The point is that it’s rare to see it in nature, so our minds tend to think that they are not natural.

OisinMoran

5d ago

My contribution to the genre: negative border radius.

Let's make the (digital) world sharper

https://x.com/TheOisinMoran/status/1846417247075459235

onion2k

5d ago

Open devtools and add `html * { border-radius: 6px; }` to make this site look lovely.

nrhrjrjrjtntbt

5d ago

Microsoft Metro Design fan?

virajk_31

5d ago

We like border radius, because we were forced to.

kragen

5d ago

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?

helle253

5d ago

why is this flagged lmao

ohadron

5d ago

But why

rpgbr

5d ago

fuckexcessiveborderradius.com (I'm looking at you, macOS 26)

View full discussion on Hacker News

ID: 45913319Type: storyLast synced: 11/17/2025, 6:03:34 AM

Want the full context?

Jump to the original sources

Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.

Read Article View on HN