Optical Effects in User Interfaces
Good article in general but mixed with many fallacies.<p>1. Size is obviously not height. It's the area of the shape. There are complications though, e.g. negative space often adds weight. Blurring shapes is a terrible idea here.<p>2. Aligning shape edges is also an optimization problem to equalize overshooting areas.<p>3. Finding a visual center has nothing to do with the circumcircle in a general case. It's a well-known centroid. But, again, there are lots of complications.<p>4. A circle is perfectly circular. There are other reasons for the "O" adjustments in typography. It's even mentioned later on with no connection to here.<p>5. The round corners is another story. In this case G2 fillets are most pleasing. It's hard to make this adjustment by hand, that is why the examples look bad and unnatural. Squircle, Lamé curve, has nothing to do with the iOS icon shape.<p>Most of these adjustments can be done with mathematical precision. The rest can be approximated well enough with mathematical models. Ideally, design tools should guide these adjustments. There is definitely interest. My most successful plugin for Sketch happened to be the one for optical adjustments <a href="http://designplugins.com/optically" rel="nofollow">http://designplugins.com/optically</a>.