Kai Krause

Kai Krause is a German software and graphical user interface designer, born on 14 March 1957 in Dortmund, who moved to California in 1976. He is best known as a founder of MetaCreations Corp., which began as HSC Software and released the first version of Kai's Power Tools in 1992. The company later added Bryce and other graphics titles, and after a run of mergers with Fractal Design, RayDream, Specular and Real-Time Geometry it took the MetaCreations name in 1997. The interfaces he shaped for these products used soft shadows, rounded corners and translucency before those looks became common. Before his software career he worked with early synthesizers and vocoders and contributed sound effects to records and films. He holds a master's degree from the Brooks Institute and an honorary doctorate from the University of Essen, and in 2005 the DEMO conference listed him among its top fifteen innovators of the previous fifteen years.