You may laugh at how weird this is, but there is one thing that came out of the Kai Krause aesthetic that is everywhere today: buttons that light up on mouseove

You may laugh at how weird this is, but there is one thing that came out of the Kai Krause aesthetic that is everywhere today: buttons that light up on mouseover. I have a distinct memory of him announcing this unfamiliar idea as "slightly ahead of the Mac UI". In the mid-90s, I think most of us working with tech still thought in terms of a monochrome bitmapped interface. To apply a transformation to an already highly styled button, just to indicate it was clickable? It seemed like a huge waste of computing resources. In Kai's UIs, light-up-on-mouseover was more of a necessity since nothing followed UI guidelines - you had to discover what was even clickable. For modern UIs it's more subtle; you may have already guessed what was clickable, but the UI feels a bit more alive and active, and it helps teach some UI paradigms. Now, of course, we have the opposite problem: the hover action doesn't exist on touch platforms so it's being slowly forgotten.