No, pixel art is not at all about "big blocky pixels" - that's some silly 8-bit retro movement. Pixel art is about a crisp, distinctive look and intricate detail. For instance, this piece:
<a href="http://www.pixeljoint.com/pixelart/29178.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.pixeljoint.com/pixelart/29178.htm</a><p>Keep in mind that bad graphics are not retro! This is seen a lot in indie games - the creator isn't very artistic and so they use low-quality sprites to make up for it and call it retro (this is also happening with chiptunes/module scene).<p>Also, here's a wonderful guide/explanation on pixel art - a very very good read:
<a href="http://forum.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=32273" rel="nofollow">http://forum.wesnoth.org/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=32273</a>
I'm a big fan of pixel art. I've created a WebGL based low res pixel engine, a simple example of it is here: <a href="http://yaysarahandmatt.org" rel="nofollow">http://yaysarahandmatt.org</a> (celebrating my wedding engagement)<p>I'm surprised he mentioned Photoshop. There are many dedicated pixel art programs that are far better for the task such as [Pixen][0], Graphics Gale[1], the new Pyxel Edit[2] and my own LoveToPixel[3] (done in HTML5 Canvas)<p>[0]<a href="https://github.com/Pixen/Pixen" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/Pixen/Pixen</a>
[1]<a href="http://www.humanbalance.net/gale/us/" rel="nofollow">http://www.humanbalance.net/gale/us/</a>
[2]<a href="http://pyxeledit.com/" rel="nofollow">http://pyxeledit.com/</a>
[3]<a href="https://github.com/city41/LoveToPixel" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/city41/LoveToPixel</a>
Also, if you draw your pixel graphics pre-scaled, you're locking yourself into nearest-neighbor interpolation. There are plenty of other cool interpolation algorithms that you might want to use to use, like scale2x or hq2x.
Another reason for doing this is motion. If the images themselves have double-pixels, then the game can still render moved/rotated images within the device's pixels and not the image's pixels. So scaling up your canvas makes development easier, in addition to the artwork creation.<p>I used this method with a little platform game I was creating, with the exception of text: <a href="http://minipenguin.com/?cat=32" rel="nofollow">http://minipenguin.com/?cat=32</a>
Interesting that designing for iOS non-games is the opposite: design @2x and then scale down.<p>The scaling down can be tricky though. I'd love to see a similar post to this: a pro's take on retina graphics.