12 min readCSS,
UI,
Web DesignFor years, developers have been hacking around the limitations of border-radius, using clip-path, SVG masks, and fragile workarounds just to get anything other than round corners. The new corner-shape property finally changes that, opening the door to beveled, scooped, and squircle corners.When I first started building websites, rounded corners required five background images, one for each corner, one for the body, and a prayer that the client wouldn’t ask for a different radius. Then the border-radius property landed, and the entire web collectively sighed with relief. That was over fifteen years ago, and honestly, we’ve been riding that same wave ever since. Just as then, I hope that we can look at this feature as a progressive enhancement slowly making its way to other browsers.I like a good border-radius like any other guy, but the fact is that it only gives us one shape. Round. That’s it. Want beveled corners? Clip-path. Scooped ticket edges? SVG mask. Squircle app icons? A carefully tuned SVG that you hope nobody asks you to animate. We’ve been hacking around the limitations of border-radius for years, and those hacks come with real trade-offs: borders don’t follow clip-paths, shadows get cut off, and you end up with brittle code that breaks the moment someone changes a padding value.Well, the new corner-shape changes all of that.The corner-shape property is a companion to border-radius. It doesn’t replace it; it modifies the shape of the curve that border-radius creates. Without border-radius, corner-shape does nothing. But together, they’re a powerful pair.The property accepts these values:round: the default, same as regular border-radius,squircle: a superellipse, the smooth Apple-style rounded square,bevel: a straight line between the two radius endpoints (snipped corners),scoop: an inverted curve, creating concave corners,notch: sharp inward cuts,square: effectively removes the rounding, overriding border-radius.And you can set different values per corner, just like border-radius:*corner-shape: bevel round scoop squircle;
