There’s an old Brazilian saying: “Santo de casa não faz milagre” — the saint of the house performs no miracles. The closest English equivalent is probably “the cobbler’s children have no shoes” — the idea that the professional who serves everyone else is often the last one to serve himself. In my case, substitute cobbler for web developer and shoes for a finished, stable, live website that I haven’t touched in the last forty-eight hours.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about being a designer: the analytical mode never turns off. It’s not a switch. It’s a factory setting. You visit your own site and instead of seeing a website, you see a list. A mental, ever-growing, deeply personal list of things that are almost right — the spacing that’s slightly off, the section that could breathe more, the hero image that made sense three weeks ago but now feels like a different era entirely.
So you fix it. And then you see something else. And you fix that too. And somewhere around the fourth revision of a page that was perfectly functional to begin with, you realize you’ve spent three hours on a website that exactly zero clients have complained about — because they were too busy asking you to fix theirs.
This is the paradox of the creative mind at work on its own behalf: the same instinct that makes you good at the job is the exact thing that makes you incapable of leaving your own work alone.
My personal relationship with my website has gone through more phases than a Christopher Nolan protagonist. I’ve rebuilt sections from scratch because a new tool came out. I’ve scrapped entire layouts because I found a technique I liked better. I’ve started over not because anything was broken, but because yesterday’s version felt like yesterday. Today is incomplete. Yesterday is already outdated. And tomorrow, without question, there will be something cooler out there — a new plugin, a new interaction pattern, a new way to do the thing I just finished doing.
The solution, as it turns out, was embarrassingly simple: a default WordPress theme.
Not because I gave up. Not because I ran out of ideas. But because a plain, unpretentious theme forces an honest conversation. No visual noise competing for attention. No elaborate layouts performing on behalf of a portfolio that isn’t finished yet. Just words, structure, and whatever I actually have to say — which, as it turns out, is quite a lot.
The default theme is the creative’s version of a deep breath. It says: the work is the point, not the wrapper. It says: I am a designer who knows exactly what this could look like, and I am choosing, deliberately, to leave it alone for now. That distinction matters. There is a difference between a site that looks plain because its owner doesn’t know better, and a site that looks plain because its owner knows precisely what happens when they’re left unsupervised with a staging environment and a free afternoon.
This is that second kind.
The grand redesign is coming. It always is. But until the vision is locked, the tools are chosen, and I’ve resisted the urge to change everything three days after launch — the default theme stays. Stable. Honest. Miraculously untouched.
The saint of this house is taking a break.
— Filipe Carvalho Web Developer · Designer · Recovering Perfectionist