There is no doubt that the King of Cool is Kai Krause.
This German designer burst on to the digital design scene a few years ago with a series of filters that worked on the Macintosh with Adobe's Photoshop, the king of image manipulation software.
King Krause is thought by some to be completely mad. He may well be, but it is a madness that creates an extraordinary and sometimes haunting beauty.
Kai's Power Tools - more commonly known as KPT - gave Photoshop fanatics the ability to do hundreds of different things with an assortment of filters.
It was not simply the filters that made them noteworthy; it was also the way the interface was designed.
Kai Krause comes from the let's-see-what-happens-when-we-push-this school of design. He wants the user to fool around and see what will appear on the screen.
After his filters, his company came up with a handful of quite extraordinary things, such as Convolver and the most extraordinary of them all Bryce. It is quite easy to create other-worldly landscapes using Bryce with just a few clicks of the mouse.