Visual examples: Three alternatives to using squares

Last night while standing at the cashier's line a magazine cover caught my eye by their use of a circle. Allow me to explain,  sometimes magazine covers (and slides) use circles to add text to a photograph, like in the image below.

Source: Flick

Now, what I saw yesterday was a pointy circle, something like this:

I think is this ingenious not only because it gets more attention, but also because it has more white space. An additional advantage is that straight lines make alignment easier.

Trick number two. This one comes from the Periodic Table of Typeface, where the elements are not enclose in normal squares, but in "pointy round squares", something like this:
 

where all but the top right corner are rounded. If the stroke is bigger, the effect will be stronger.  Cool effect, not nothing more than eye candy. But we can modified it get a visual communication booster.

Trick number three. What if we inverse the last effect and sharpen the round corners and round the sharp one? By itself this is no more than eye candy, but if we multiply it ....

bang!  We get a great "these 4 things belong together" effect like  the one shown above.

You might be thinking, "but Juan you just split a rounded square in four parts!". I know I just realize that... Anyhow,  is simple, clean, elegant. 

So there you have it. Three ways to escape the regular shapes. If you interested in how to actually do this, drop me a line on the comment section below.