yick.art — Editorial Archive

Readers browse articles, filter them by mentioned artist via an alphabetical navigator, and switch between Russian and English versions of each piece. Custom Sanity schemas model the archive — artists as first-class entities (with surname grouping, prefixes, initials), sources, article-to-artist relationships. Portable Text rendering with footnotes and source links, Sanity draft/preview mode, full bilingual SEO.

An art critic organizes work by artist and source, not by publish date — so a blog engine was the wrong tool. I ran the project end to end, shaping product direction with the designer and building around how the archive is actually used:

• Product + design — owned direction, proposed and rejected solutions with the designer rather than implementing specs blindly (credited on the live site for development and product management)

• Custom i18n — route-preserving language switcher, redirects on missing translations, <html lang> sync, handling of broken translations and null fields; no off-the-shelf library

• Content model for an archive, not a blog — schemas built around artist/source relationships

• Performance — homepage prefetch of archive/search data, memoized lists, skeleton states, lazy/preload images

• Responsive from scratch — separate mobile/desktop passes on every page, portal-based menu, custom adaptive typography