Most pixel art today is designed around square pixels. The pixels are typically blown up to some multiple for viewing - and in many cases, not even an integer m

Most pixel art today is designed around square pixels. The pixels are typically blown up to some multiple for viewing - and in many cases, not even an integer multiple! This has resulted in the design of filter kernels that make some trade-off between the true sharpness of square pixels and the aliasing of nearest neighbor interpolation. Therefore, even before images hit the display there is a rationale to avoid using photographic resampling techniques, just because the method of their authoring defined the meaning otherwise. See also: The gradual evolution of font rendering techniques. Earlier versions of Windows aimed for pixel-grid snapping to produce clean, sharp edges. Newer ones introduced anti-aliasing techniques, but again made trade-offs towards sharp edges, including exploitation of the LCD display format, while the contemporary Apple rendering favored the photographic approach. With the introduction of high DPI the differences have become less pronounced, but there's still disagreement about how best to render vector fonts into pixels.