The tendency toward conformism, toward lazily adapting to standard procedures easily exploited by computers, can influence, far more profoundly than one might imagine, both the design of the objects around us and, ultimately, collective aesthetic taste itself. From this perspective, rather than expanding the scope for creativity and invention, computers can drastically narrow the range of available models by subordinating the desired aesthetic result to a standard procedure.

[...] the tool that allows one to draw a line on the computer is a kind of "virtual lathe" that is easy to use and that, in a certain sense, "dictates the forms." This is the so-called pen tool found in the main and most widely used professional drawing software, based on the theory of Bézier curves.

Beyond cubic and quadratic Béziers, there's rational Bézier, higher-degree Bézier, and HyperBezier. The B-spline family includes uniform and non-uniform B-splines, NURBS, and T-splines. Hermite-type interpolating splines include Hermite splines, Ferguson curves, cardinal splines, Catmull-Rom splines (and the centripetal variant), and Kochanek-Bartels / TCB splines. Cubic splines can have various boundary conditions: natural, clamped, not-a-knot, relaxed end, cyclic, and anti-cyclic. Shape-preserving interpolants include Akima splines, Steffen splines, and monotone cubic interpolation. Subdivision approaches include Chaikin curves, Lane-Riesenfeld, four-point subdivision, and Dyn-Levin-Gregory. For curvature-continuous or "fair" curves there are clothoids (Euler spirals / Cornu spirals), elastica, minimum energy curves, minimum variation curves, log-aesthetic curves, Spiro curves, κ-curves, and Pythagorean hodograph curves. Arc-based constructions include biarcs, arc splines, polycentric arcs, and conic splines. Motion planning uses Dubins curves and Reeds-Shepp curves. Type design has its own traditions with Hobby splines, Ikarus curves, and superellipses (Lamé curves). And there are always the general algebraic forms: conic sections, rational quadratics, power basis polynomials, and Coons curves. On top of that, periodic functions like sine, square, sawtooth, and triangle waves, statistical distributions like Gaussian / bell curves and sigmoid curves, and classical named curves like the Witch of Agnesi, lemniscate, cardioid, limaçon, spirals (Archimedean, logarithmic, Fermat), catenaries, cycloids, epicycloids, hypocycloids, Lissajous curves, rhodonea / rose curves, and so on can be combined, stacked and used as effectors to modify the curve representations.