Dear Rounded Corners, You Win

I give up. You win. Take my sharp edges, my right-angled pride, my once-faithful allegiance to rectangles so boxy they could slice a pixel in half.

You’ve conquered every interface, every button, every modal window, every “Skip Intro” corner of the digital universe. Rounded Corners, you’ve achieved total domination—and I have to admit, you’re looking… annoyingly great while doing it.

I remember a time—simpler, crueler—when buttons were square. Cold. Efficient. Brutalist. They said, “Click me, or don’t. I don’t care.” 

Then you came along with your 8px radii and your emotionally available border-radius: 0.5rem. Suddenly, everything had to be approachable. Friendly. Softer than a startup pitch deck font.

Your rise wasn’t overnight. You wormed your way in, one slightly-rounded card at a time. First, it was iOS. Then Material Design.

Then everyone’s SaaS dashboard decided they, too, wanted to look like 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 look like 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 looks like a soft pillow for your cursor to nap on.

You win, 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

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.