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Futuristic Design, Inc.
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StraightFace column archive |
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September 1, 2000 Love him or hate his user interfaces, Kai Krause’s audaciousness is sorely missed. In May of 1999, Kai Krause left his position as Chief Design Officer of MetaCreations to presumably escape from the suits who were about to gut his company and give it a “business” focus. This was recently accomplished when they finished divesting MetaCreations of its entire graphics line of software in favor of 3D visualization (Metastream.com). But before his departure, Kai brought the most provocative user interfaces ever seen for graphics products to market, and established himself as a demigod in the design community. Kai has kept an extremely low profile in the media ever since his departure last year. au·da·cious adj. 1. Fearlessly, often recklessly daring; bold. 2. Unrestrained by convention or propriety; insolent. See synonyms at brave Little Photoshop of Horrors
Just about anyone
who’s ever worked with Photoshop over the last decade has seen the
exotic visual user interface of the Kai’s Power Tools series
of third party plug-ins. The people who use these plug-ins get access
to some of the most powerful graphic effects available for Photoshop.
But, the “interface police” were mortified. Kai’s tools break
every human interface guideline in the book, but people still love
them. Hmmm… Let’s start with the visual appearance -- Stunning. Horrid. Cool. Bizarre. Take your pick -- they all apply. One of the first Photoshop plug-ins (or any software really) to blatantly break the code of honor to obey the Apple Human Interface Guidelines (we were such good little lemmings to that point), KPT shocked everyone in the early 1990’s. But as the great ones usually do, they produced the brilliant results to back up their eccentric behavior. Personally, I was both mesmerized by the visuals and exhilarated by the arrogance. The cool sliders, the obnoxious colors, the great visual feedback of the UI widgets, and the mystery of discovering how the bloody thing worked all added up to produce a very unique experience. Good to some, horrible to others. Bottom line -- someone actually pissed on the rulebook and seemingly got away with it. Insolent, indeed. That was a real watershed moment in commercial software UI design. Someone finally had the audacity to shatter every established interface convention in the pursuit of innovation (OK, that’s too strong a word – let’s substitute “cool” for innovation). It was heresy, but they went for it anyway. Problem was, the press branded his products as “non-standard”, not to mention the binary love or hate reaction it elicited from die hard Photoshop users. Nonetheless, it sold fairly well despite the critic's objections, and established a cornerstone for the MetaCreations franchise to be built on. More to the Picture
Kai’s next huge breakthrough came when the MetaCreations products all shifted to a new photorealistic visual appearance and “room” metaphor in the late 1990’s, first seen in the Bryce 3D modeling and rendering application, and then later in the Kai’s Photo Soap product. At the time (and I think to this day) it was the best example of using rendered 3D objects in a 2D interface as tools, cursors, palettes and dialogs. The interface was absolutely beautiful to behold. The team of artists and interface designers that put this product together gave us one of the best examples of interdisciplinary collaboration that I’ve ever seen. There is so much
attention to detail in Kai's Photo Soap that it’s scary. The
interface is properly lit (probably rendered and retouched) and
textured, but more importantly, it has a tactile feeling
that’s still unmatched. The “drawers” of the containers hesitate
just a moment as their opening to mimic a push-in-to-release
mechanism. The interface uses transparency in a great way. It’s
amazing stuff. If you ever get the chance to use Kai’s PhotoSoap,
you’ll see what I mean. Take home point -- the team combined stunning visuals with palpable mechanical interaction to create an entirely new type of user experience. This interface was the precursor to Apple’s recent QuickTime Player and rash of rendered 3D skins for Windows audio utilities. The Paradox So, even though Kai is a brilliant designer, I couldn’t stand using his early products, and I still don’t use any of the latest ones (even though they’re incredibly powerful). This paradox is interesting to me; I argue for what those tools represent, but I don't feel compelled to use them. I equate it to something like this – people lust after Ferraris because they are beautiful to look at, but it doesn’t occur to them they actually have a rough ride compared to what they’re used to because it’s really a racing car. Kai’s tools blow us all away visually and results-wise, but they cause people to actually have to explore, experiment and learn new behaviors to get comfortable using them. We all thought that
idealistic stuff was great ten years ago, but today those things are
something we don’t want to deal with because of our short attention
spans. This can’t be good, right? Hopefully we as an industry figure
out a balance going forward
so those elements are not lost in our march toward efficiency.
Regardless, Kai
Krause showed us all something – don’t be afraid to try and
innovate, even in the face of overwhelming momentum. That’s when
true brilliance can happen. Worst case? The press, industry and
pundits will crucify you. But on the other hand, you just may be the next Kai. M. Pell P.S. - Hey Kai, where are you? Come on back. You gotta work on this HTML interface thing…
[ Writer's
note: This column continually referred to Kai, but
we all know that no one works in a vacuum, so I want to acknowledge
the team of people who worked with him over the years at MetaTools/MetaCreations
as also responsible for accomplishments that he’s often cited for
alone. -- M. Pell ]
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