But to answer where it came from? It came from the limitations of the web at the time - table based layout, low graphic resolutions, browser running under 16 megs (not gigs) of ram.
We also had a rule that no page could weigh under 26k, although pages by users of Geocities could be larger, all the pages that ran geocities had to be 26kb or less.
...I don't know. You can have low-resolution 8-bit graphics which are better† designed. Look at classic Mac OS, or modern indie games with a retro pixel art aesthetic.
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† "Better" in this case means something akin to "what most people today would consider more professional." I don't want to judge.
The retro pixel art aesthetic is just that - an aesthetic. It's intentional and doesn't accurately reflect the technology it imitates, because it's about a vibe. The people creating Geocities webpages weren't professional developers or artists trying to adhere to a particular aesthetic, they were regular (mostly non-technical) people doing what they thought looked cool at the time, or just copying other sites and using the graphic elements or templates provided by Geocities.
Pixel graphics were still pretty much current at that time. Not everyone threw away the SNES/genesis when the next gen systems came out, most people probably still had one.
And to do the pixel graphic style you need a pixel font which was impossible because you can only reference fonts people have on their computer, Fixedsys font was the best you could reference and some did do that.
Pixel graphics were still pretty much current at that time. Not everyone threw away the SNES/genesis when the next gen systems came out, most people probably still had one.
