Usability Post offered a cognitive argument for curved corners that boils down to:

• If you have to squares of equal width on top of each other, with a line dividing them the eye could perceive it it as two separate parts, instead of two sections of a whole.
• However, if you add curves to all four corners, it appears as an unmistakably whole.

They offer proof of this principle with the worst magic eye poster ever. I don't mock the example because its an obvious principle (its not obvious until someone points it out), but because curved corners are so 2003. If web designs are houses, then curved corners are now mostly used like a sort of spackle; sometimes, they're good artistic flourishes too. On the otherhand, this grunge design movement offers a more ambitious example of the principle. It bellylaughs at these crude boxes with rounded corners.

Jon Lebkowsky is right, this is an eye-popping thought: Ugly design = successful website. It’s a controversial claim; and but that’s about all it is.

You needn’t know a thing about design, or websites to see why this claim is complete humbug. Observe the logic:

Premise 1: Myspace, google, and craigslist are successful websites

Premise 2: Myspace, google, and craigslist are badly designed

My RSS reader has somewhere's near 800 feeds at this point. In order to cope, I've for a long time had a folder titled, "Feeds I actually read" (yes, a number of my thunderbird folders are jokes that I crack to myself. Its pathetic...). Anyways, one of my favorites in the folder I actually read is a blog called Creating Passionante Users. One of the more recent entries had a graph that I thought every single drupal user, developer, and advocate should see: