[sgnnseven]

It's a really a complex answer with many facets but the main one in my opinion is that the displays of that era were CRTs with extremely low resolution (e.g. 1024x768) and generally dull color depth. This in turn required things within the page to be large, blocky, and saturated to make it appear pleasant to the eyes. What you see in these screenshots of FrontPage is _not_ what the user nor the developer would experience on such hardware. As a analogue example of a game character on an LCD vs CRT might help illustrate this: https://kayin.moe/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/1391807722376-1....

Some other smaller things also contributed but I don't think they were such big deals:

- Lack of good compression on both transfer of data and file formats, necessitating simpler designs and palette-based image formats.

- Graphics acceleration was generally slow so smooth animations were out.

- Image creation/editing tools were practically non-existent and digital cameras were rare so it makes sense that the resulting pages that have had designed assets were scary-looking.