Why Profile Images Are Round?

Instagram got rid of square images in 2015. Now, its profile pictures are circled. Facebook, Snapchat, and LinkedIn all followed the same trend and ditched the square-shape photos.

Have you ever wondered why did these tech giants do it? And what is the reason behind the usage of the rounded images?

Some say it might be due to aesthetics. However, there are other reasons behind this move.

Why Are the Profile Images Rounded?

UX Movement, an online source about the best practices in user experience design, explains that the round-shape pictures help to accentuate faces to a greater extent.

Square-shaped images have corners that disseminate our attention. In contrast, circles cut the edges to make a better facial focus.

As a result, rounded images have been actively used in most social media networks, where profile images aim to showcase an individual’s face and facial expressions.

However, in some cases, the background might contain the details that users want to see. For instance, images of nature, home decorations, and street movement contain various elements that help us understand their meaning.

A few years ago, I took the photo displayed above. The original one is square-shaped. Even if you do not know the city, you might guess it with 100% certainty.

A red bus with the last stop called “Covent Garden,” left-sided driving, a part of the famous Tower Bridge visible somewhere from a distance make you immediately guess the city. You are right! It is London.

All these details share the story behind the image. As a matter of experiment, I rounded the photo. You can also see it below. To my surprise, it cut essential elements, which makes the story incomplete.

If you happen to work as a photographer, social media marketing manager, or even a blogger, you ought to know these tiny details to help your visuals communicate the context behind your stories.

Increase in Mobile Device Usage

Perhaps, there is one more reason that made circle-shaped images that popular.

The number of users coming from mobile devices has been drastically growing since 2011. However, most of the desktop-oriented interfaces were not adapted for mobiles back then. It was hard to read and see the elements on pages.

With the round-shaped images, Facebook tried to solve the issue when users had to squint at their phones trying to see which website it is and what is written on the page.

As we’ve already seen, social media is a real copycat industry, where one platform follows the trends and strategies of the rest.

The new trend has been quickly adopted by other social media networks, such as Instagram, Snapchat, and LinkedIn.

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Surprisingly, a lot of talks about rounded corners began with drumroll Steve Jobs! He was a strong advocate of rounded images, forcing Apple employees to re-design and re-code multiple device interfaces.

Walter Isaacson, a famous American author, and professor at the Tulane University of History, published an in-depth bibliography about Steve Jobs, where he outlined an exciting story.

Steve Jobs used to criticize his macOS engineers for creating square-shaped elements. In particular, the engineer wanted to design square-shaped buttons since it was much easier to render them. Steve Jobs was firmly against this idea. He took the engineer for a walk and pointed at everything with a rounded shape, the yield sign, the parking sign, everything. Jobs tried to communicate the following:

“It’s very rare to find a sharp corner in the natural world. It’s a very rare shape."

“The world is made of rounded corners. Sharp corners hurt you. Sharp corners are to be avoided.”

Apple still remembers this lesson from Steve Jobs. Guess what? All iPhone app icons have rounded icons to this day.