Not everything needs to be a round rect

For the many early years of its existence, Chrome sported a pretty distinctive – perhaps even iconic? – look to its tabs… …with even the “new tab” button looking like a tab embryo waiting to be brought into existence. At some point, however, during one of the redesigns, the tabs have been flattened to look like many other round rects in the UI, and the new tab button asked to dress in the minimalistic button uniform every other button was already wearing: Here’s a new example of this trend. iOS’s memorable tooth-shaped keyboard key extensions, there with us since 2007… that is, until yesterday, when iOS 27 designers turned them into Yet Another Round Rect: There would be a time in my life where I’d see these two as a triumph of minimalism and consistency. But I feel differently today. I don’t even mean that tabs should look a certain way to help users, or that skeuomorphism absolutely needs to come back, or that someone has to brush up on shape coding. I mostly feel that way because…