Pop Art emerged in the 1950s in Britain and exploded in 1960s America through Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, and others. It was a deliberate provocation — fine art made from soup cans, comic strips, and advertising. The movement argued that the boundary between "high" art and "low" culture was arbitrary, and then gleefully erased it.
Lichtenstein's Ben-Day dots, borrowed from cheap comic-book printing, became fine art when painted at massive scale. Warhol's screen-prints of Marilyn Monroe and Campbell's Soup turned mass production into an artistic method. The aesthetic was inherently democratic — its source material was everywhere, seen by everyone, owned by no one.
On the web, Pop Art translates into maximum visual impact: primary colors, thick outlines, halftone patterns, and typography that hits like a headline. It rejects the quiet sophistication of minimalism and the warm subtlety of organic design. Instead, it says: this is a surface, and that surface should be as loud and vivid as a billboard on Times Square.