html-squircle

html-squircle is a lightweight, framework-agnostic JavaScript package designed to create superellipse squircles (smooth, rounded shapes) that can be used as SVG clip paths or backgrounds for web elements. This package is perfect for developers looking to add modern, beautifully-rounded corners to the web with minimal effort.

Features

• Generate squircles as SVG strings for use in clip-path or background-image inline styles.
• Unlike a true superellipse, transitions gracefully into straight edges, making it suitable for UI elements of various sizes.
• Customizable curve length, curve smoothness, background (solid color or gradient), stroke color, stroke width, and SVG injections to defs or body.
• Easy to use with any web framework or vanilla JavaScript.
• Exports a React component and hooks that will sync with the size of an element and optionally cache results globally.

Installation

You can install html-squircle using npm:

npm install html-squircle

Usage

As a React component:

import * as React from "react"
import { Squircle } from "html-squircle/react"

import type { Types } from "html-squircle"

const squircleSquare200: Types.SquircleOptionsBackground = {
  width: 200,
  height: 200,
  stroke: "black",
  strokeWidth: 2,
  background: "#ff6347",
}

function Example() {
  return (
    <Squircle
      as="div"
      squircle={squircleSquare200}
    >
      Hello, world!
    </Squircle>
  )
}

Or using the React hooks:

import * as React from "react"
import { useClipSquircle } from "html-squircle/react"
import { Button } from "some-ui-library"

function RoundedButton() {
  const ref = React.useRef<Element | null>(null)
  const clipStyle = useClipSquircle(ref)

  return <Button style={clipStyle} />
}

For React, Squircle, CacheProvider, useClipSquircle, useBackgroundSquircle, and useSquircle are exported.

Squircle is a polymorphic component, accepting as and squircle props, as well as all the other standard attributes.

• as: The name of an intrinsic element.
• squircle: Options to pass to the underlying squircle-computation function, excluding width and height, since those are measured and kept in sync for you.

The hooks simply return a style to be applied inline, and must be used to render elements unconditionally - or else their ResizeObserver will drop off.

To memoize the results of squircle computation globally, wrap your app in the CacheProvider component. You may pass to this a capacity prop (default 20) for the LRU cache used behind the scenes. If you don't use this, results will be memoized at the component level, and all the cache-related code should be tree-shaken at compile time.

Tips for squircle function options

The default values for curveLength (calculated based on shortest side) and roundness (0.2) will produce shapes exactly like Apple's app icons when the width and height are equal.

When trying to control the sharpness of the curve, first adjust the curveLength parameter. If you're not getting the result you want, then reach for roundness.

The backgroundSquircle function is only really useful if you need to add a stroke to your background (regular CSS border will be clipped if you use clip-path), or if you need to do something else fancy with SVG (see below).

Use the injectedDefs and injectedBody params if you need to do anything custom with the generated background SVG. This must be a string. You can refer to other elements of the SVG in <use /> elements by referring to their ids: #path, #rect, #clip, #mask, #grad. To create stringified xml tag structures easily, you can use the exported tag function. For maximum browser support and to align with the rest of the SVG result, always use single quotes in strings. Your input will be URI-encoded for you, so don't do this yourself.

The values can be partly animated with CSS. The width and height will smoothly transition, but the curves will fade from one definition to the next.