It wasn’t obvious at the time that web design should have anything to do with print. Its immediate predecessors were a bunch of online systems like BBSes, Compuserve, Prodigy that either ran inside a terminal emulator with garish ANSI colors at best, or shipped with their own custom GUI app for access.

There was a lot of activity in the late ‘90s around what “authentic to the medium” web design could look like, but I don’t remember people being very interested in emulating traditional print design — which itself was in turmoil thanks to digital publishing systems. Open a 1996 issue of Wired and you’ll probably think the designers were on crack: purple text on garish background images, cut-up barely readable fonts, that kind of thing.

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.

I guess partly because it became easily accessible and also the curiosity to try different things. Cyan fonts on black background? It was beautiful and fun. :)