Nah, the core problem on is the misuse of opacity, too many shades of one color (such as the light gray in the article) instead of relying on weight variation, dividers, italics, etc.
Take this block of text in the article:
"I thought my eyesight was beginning to go. It turns out, I’m suffering from design."
Instead of leaving it a legible black and have the divider + italics convey the separation from the article...
They went with rgba(0,0,0,0.5) on a font that is hard to read on a white background with that shade of a gray. Try removing those sort of CSS rules from the Wired Article and you'll find it much more legible.
They repeat this sin whenever they quote someone such as:
A color is a color isn’t a color…
…not to computers…and not to the human eye.
They also put a ton of whitespace around the quote which is already enough to separate it. The absurdly annoying light gray is annoying and not required.
Take this block of text in the article:
"I thought my eyesight was beginning to go. It turns out, I’m suffering from design."
Instead of leaving it a legible black and have the divider + italics convey the separation from the article...
They went with rgba(0,0,0,0.5) on a font that is hard to read on a white background with that shade of a gray. Try removing those sort of CSS rules from the Wired Article and you'll find it much more legible.
They repeat this sin whenever they quote someone such as:
A color is a color isn’t a color… …not to computers…and not to the human eye.
They also put a ton of whitespace around the quote which is already enough to separate it. The absurdly annoying light gray is annoying and not required.