Standing in the shadow of Giotto

Reclaiming our fading digital renaissance

Hate to break it to you, but we’re not living through a renaissance.

No matter what we thought when this journey started — when the internet was young and full of creative spark — we’re not witnessing the next great human awakening.

It’s amazing how quickly we confused acceleration with advancement.

In the early days of the web, it felt like our left brains met with our right brains in a cosmic collision. A place where craft with words, structure, and context merged into a new form and something both quirky and beautiful emerged.

Back then, we didn’t always know where to begin, but we figured it out together.

Craft was the point

Craft with intent. Craft with care. Craft with time.

That era felt like a kind of digital renaissance in its own right. We even used the term freely, paralleling the web’s explosion of shared knowledge and creativity with the Italian enlightenment. And that quaint little inkling wasn’t entirely wrong either.

From seemingly out of the blue, we built new frameworks, learned from each other, and shared voraciously. We had mentors. We had humility.

But we’re not heading there anymore. We’ve taken a different path — one that prioritizes social visibility, status signals, and speed over value.

Engagement theater and the collapse of mentorship

Not long ago, I described the current state of design discourse where we’ve turned what could be meaningful dialogue into engagement theater.

And more importantly I proposed some ways to reframe the discourse to be less toxic.

I was surprised it caught on the way it did. The piece only pointed out what we already see and know.

Fear-based rhetoric drives clicks. Extremes get shared for engagement. And in all that noise, something essential is breaking.

A Medium reader responded to that idea with a sharp observation:

“This creates a toxic dynamic where experience becomes liability rather than asset, fracturing the mentorship culture that once strengthened our field.”

Bingo.

In all this fast-moving noise, senior designers are being pressured to stay loud and visible or risk becoming irrelevant. Junior designers are told the traditional fundamentals don’t matter from people who should, quite frankly, know a whole lot better. The result is a widening generational gap and a mentorship vacuum where growth used to flow.

We’re not cultivating new talent. We’re performing at each other. Auditioning for the new era.

But for whom?

The myth of patronage

During the renaissance, patrons were more than financiers. They were believers in human potential.

Lorenzo de’ Medici, arguably the most influential patron of the Italian Renaissance, once wrote:

“All citizens must place the common good before the private good.”

This was more than political rhetoric. It was a worldview. He funded art, architecture, libraries, and education that lasted for centuries because he saw them as investments in the civic soul.

He believed beauty, culture, and knowledge weren’t luxuries — but necessities for society to flourish.

Now compare that to the richest man in the world today. A man who built his empire on attention and spectacle, who recently said with all sincerity:

“The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

The notion that empathy is weakness or compassion is inefficiency — that’s not patronage.

To a community of designers, it’s not even investment — it’s exploitation.

It’s proof that most social media platforms don’t support our craft or our growth as designers. Rather they’re harvesting our attention, our credibility, and our creative labor.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious yet again, this counters everything human-centered design was built to protect.

We’re no longer being sponsored to pursue beauty, meaning, or truth. We’re being farmed for engagement.

And for what reason? To satisfy someone else’s self-serving agenda, no matter how patently wrong or unaccountable it goes.

And yet designers, creators, and builders still operate inside this warped, single-purpose megaphone. As if it belonged to a Medici-like figure — a visionary protector of innovation.

How far we have strayed.

Renaissance patrons weren’t simply wealthy. They were invested in the flourishing of the human spirit.

Today’s platform overlords offer no such vision.

They reward noise over nuance.
They weaponize attention, then cynically sell it back to us — taking advantage of our human weaknesses at every turn.
They see humanity as an easily avoided obstacle to more wealth and power, not a collective purpose — spiritual or otherwise.

There’s a reason AI-driven design enthusiasts use market-driven words like “bullish” instead of words like “optimistic” to describe their zeal for the new era, with all the disruptions and contradictions it currently entails.

This is not a new golden age. It’s an accelerated collapse of our values disguised as progress.

Unless we open our eyes.

This is not a renaissance

The Renaissance was a reflection of humanity—flawed, yes, but full of magic and soul. Art was sacred. Craft was revered. Mentorship was embedded into the process.

David.
The Gates of Paradise.
The Pietà.
The Sistine Chapel.

These works didn’t happen because of acceleration. They happened because of time, transmission of technique, and devotion to a higher cause infused with a sense of awe and humility.

The story I was told in art school was that Michelangelo, despite being wildly famous in his time—more so than any rock star or political figure today—was humble in his recognition of those who came before.

When praised, he would say:
“I stand in the shadow of Giotto.”

Now, you’d have to know that Giotto di Bondone’s work was ree-ough by comparison to any of the great masters, ninja turtles included. Damn near primitive, even.

But it sparked a break from tradition and created space for the flourish of creativity that came next.

That evolutionary jump mattered. And it still should.

If we want it back

If we want to reclaim anything close to a renaissance—digital or otherwise—we have to stop pretending it’s happening now.

It’s not.

We have to stop pretending that satisficed design, spat out from prompts, is anything but trained contextual pattern matching—borne out from the hard work toiled and iterated over time by modern primitive masters, until it became the accepted norm.

And we have to remember that our human-centered values are still sacred, unchanged by automated design efficiency, and still the most important part of our creative call to action.

This means doubling down.

• Doubling down on outcomes that matter. And finding ways to measure and improve them.
• Doubling down on empathy, if not compassion. Because if we’re all operating at 10x, why shouldn’t we exponentially stretch this goal too?
• Doubling down on mentorship. We need to protect the mentorship circle that once strengthened our field, and not mistake “look at me” posts as a substitute.
• Doubling down on business clarity. Not just to survive, but to thrive in a legitimately exciting new world, if we want to get more out of it.

It means recognizing that we’re all still standing in the shadow of Giotto.

Not because the machines can’t generate good, or even great, outputs.

But because we’ll need more than output in the future.

We’ll need purpose.

In this new era, many designers are already realizing we need to be more business-minded — not as a betrayal of our values, but to protect them.

Patronage may no longer come from above. More and more, it must come from within.

For now, we have just a few important things to remember…

Legacy doesn’t come from speed alone. It comes from the recognition of our achievements, which can only happen when we look to the past with respect, believe in a future with optimism, and stand up for the human-centered values and remarkable innovations — primitive as they may seem — that once lit the path to another renaissance.

Do we have it in us to finish what we started?

Keep in touch

If this resonated with you, follow me on Medium for more stories about staying grounded in today’s design culture.

Find me on LinkedIn or my personal website, mschindler.com.

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