I surrender. You’ve won. Take my sharpness, my pride in right angles, my loyalty to rectangles so precise they could split a pixel.
You’ve overtaken every interface, button, modal window, and “Skip Intro” corner of the digital world. Rounded Corners, you’ve reached complete dominance—and I must confess, you look annoyingly good doing it.
I recall a time—simpler, harsher—when buttons were square. Cold. Efficient. Brutalist. They declared, “Click me, or don’t. I don’t care.”
Then you arrived with your 8px radii and your accessible border-radius: 0.5rem. Suddenly, everything needed to be welcoming. Friendly. Softer than a startup pitch deck font.
Your ascent wasn’t instant. You crept in, one slightly-rounded card at a time. First, it was iOS. Then Material Design.
Then every SaaS dashboard decided they, too, wanted to resemble a spa brochure. Before we knew it, even error messages had gentle curves. “You broke everything… but we love you anyway.”
And it’s not just you. You brought friends. Shadows. Gradients. Soothing pastel backgrounds. UI used to resemble a machine. Now it looks like a marshmallow went to design school.
And the worst part? Users love you. They trust you. Rounded corners whisper, “This is safe. This is clean. This app won’t steal your data… probably.” You’ve become the emotional support UI pattern of a generation.
So here I am. Border-radius: 12px. Variable: $corner-surrender. Every button in my design system now resembles a soft pillow for your cursor to rest on.
You’ve won, Rounded Corners. Just promise me one thing.
Don’t bring back gradients and glassmorphism and bounce animations all at once. I don’t have the emotional resilience.
Yours in defeat,
A former boxy idealist turned soft-UI sympathizer
Simon Sterne is a staff writer at WebdesignerDepot. He’s interested in technology, WordPress, and all things UX. In his spare time, he enjoys photography.
