The archive is the hardest page on the site

A portfolio homepage gets all the design attention. The archive page — the one holding every project, in every state a filter or search query can produce — gets treated as an afterthought, usually a grid of identical cards.

That's backwards. The homepage is seen once by most visitors. The archive is where someone actually evaluating a body of work spends their time: narrowing by sector, comparing years, checking whether a specific technology shows up more than once.

The two view modes in this archive — a visual grid and an editorial index — exist because those are genuinely different reading modes, not a decorative toggle. The grid is for browsing by visual impression. The list, with its index numbers and inline metadata, is for scanning by fact: sector, year, project type.

The empty state took longer to get right than either view. It's the one screen state where the interface has failed to show the user anything, and the instinct is to apologise. The better move is to make the reset action the most visible thing on the screen, and say plainly that nothing matched — no clever copy required.