I used to like round corners and text or box shadows, three months ago I even added round corners to images, but somehow they have become less attractive, even a bit of more annoying somewhat. I have removed all shadows and round corner, now this blog looks like:


Every thing is in rectangular shape, basically. Also removed styles for form elements, I realized they could be rendered slightly different across browsers, so styling them seems little pointless if you need to adjust for each browser.

Round corner is not bad, it provides more seamlessly visual effect, but you need to have proper padding and good radius in my opinion. More, when you put two together, they may look odd if the styles don't match well.

Shadow could be a bit an issue if you overuse it, unfortunately many developers and websites do that. Some box shadow is fine, heading text with shadow is okay, but I totally can not accept whole text in a page is with text shadow, it makes characters so hard to read. With blur or not doesn't matter, because you may think you have some eye problem since the text is blur.

By the way, I really hate the gradient effect. It's overused for sure, I would say eleven out of ten commercial websites have used it somewhere in a page at least. For me, it looks so cheap for some reason. I don't understand why people like gradient.