Apple's developer documents are a particularly awful example of the "grey-on-grey" trend: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/technotes/tn2091/_in...
Most designers work exclusively on Macs and they are not even aware of the issue.
In particular, very thin fonts look well on Macs while they look like absolute garbage under Windows (to the point where some serifs are plainly not displayed so you can't recognize the letters).
I also think that certain "gray on gray" combinations on average have higher contrast on Mac displays than on non-Macs.
It has always been my deep understanding that the artist is trying to communicate within a constrained space. Without knowing the bounds of this space an artist is truly lost. By constraining, however, the artist is able to focus, form and foster a microcosmos.
The modern web designer is rarely an artist. Web design entails extending of bounds more often than focusing them. Selling out instead of focusing and selling paradigms.
... penny for every time I heard a developer say something stupid about their own field.
Just because you're not aware of 1 thing, doesn't mean you shouldn't be called a designer anymore. Just so you're aware, your horse is high as a kite.
[edit: coherence]
I don't even know why we have the TrueType font standard anymore, if not a goddamn platform on Earth even bothered to render them remotely the same.
You know how hard it is to find a code font you like, when it doesn't even look the same from platform to platform? I've actually given up and gone so far as using old bitmap fonts from the 16-bit era, because at least I can trust those to look the same, in theory. Sometimes even then the Mac's ludicriously overzealous font smoothing will render them unintelligible.
I am impressed at the quality of the Mac's rendering but man alive, it's so extreme sometimes that it's tempting to call any font running on a Mac a derivative work.
The flipside of course is that if you're on any kind of Linux, even getting your font rendering to something like palatable can be all manner of obnoxious, not least because it will even vary from software to software. Tweak the system fonts all you want, it'll do fuck all when your browser decides to just completely override and ignore the system font rendering for it's own, usually uglier, ideas.
This is why designers give up and just design for the Mac. Because ultimately, they want things to look good, and trying to make things look both good, and consistent, on everything, is an intractable nightmare.
Have you tried Infinality on Linux?
http://www.webupd8.org/2013/06/better-font-rendering-in-linu...
Also what has this to do with Retina? I always assumed Retina is just a resolution thing, right? But the screenshots are the same resolution.
Retina does effect screenshots. I use Dropshare[0] and it actually has an option[1] to downscale Retina screenshots to a 'normal' resolution
An outstanding example of the annoyances this causes is the website of my local tram operator. Here's a screenshot on my notebook: https://twitter.com/stefanmajewsky/status/536948106366304256 -- If you want to compare the rendering on your machine: http://www.dvb.de
FTFY. Seriously, if you do all your design work on a particular piece of display hardware and actually are unaware that things tend to display differently on different hardware and in different environments then yes, hand over your "designer" title, please.
I used to have colleagues like that. I didn't tell them this quite as bluntly (because, colleagues) but oh did I wish I could. Have some pride in your work, please. Now this was in the time that "responsive" was not yet a thing (and we were happy when IE7 came out hahaha finally PNG transparency :p).
But today? What is responsive design if not a fundamental awareness that your site is going to look different on different types of hardware? How can a designer get away with such ignorance today?