- The buyer is an engineer holding a requirements document — SWaP limits, an environmental envelope, a target range, a frame-rate floor — and the old site answered none of it
- Specifications lived in three places that disagreed: manufacturer datasheets, the OEM site, and an internal spreadsheet, with different labels and different rounding for the same figure
- Export classification is a legal claim, not a spec. Several ECCN codes were single-sourced or in direct conflict between sources, and publishing a wrong one is a real liability
- There is nothing to check out. The only conversion worth building for is a technical conversation, which makes every e-commerce pattern the wrong pattern
- Two physically different sensor technologies — uncooled long-wave and cooled mid-wave — that a visitor has to be able to tell apart before any individual product page means anything
- Defense-adjacent subject matter that had to read as capability and instrumentation, not as weapons marketing
All client work
Case study · MTech Imaging
A catalog engineers can argue with.
How KumoKodo Studio rebuilt mtechimaging.com — a site that sells infrared camera cores to people who arrive already knowing their SWaP budget, their spectral band, and their target range. No cart, no pricing, no adjectives. Spec tables, range charts, and one route to an engineer.
2
Sensor families
10
Catalog spec rules
0
Unconfirmed codes shown
3
Application domains served
Client
MTech Imaging · Goleta, CA
Industry
Infrared Imaging · B2B Engineering
Services
Design, build, content, SEO
Status
Live — mtechimaging.com
The challenge
A template selling instruments.
MTech Imaging has been engineering infrared solutions since 2009, integrating and supporting cooled and uncooled thermal camera cores for defense, industrial, research, and medical programs. Their site was a hosted template that presented those cores the way a template presents anything — as tiles.
Our solution
Build the site as an instrument.
The design direction — internally, “Thermal Instrument” — takes its cues from the product rather than from the category. It is dark because the work is done in the dark, and it is precise because the audience is.
01
A palette taken from the signal
Instrument black under a cold brand cyan for precision, with thermal amber reserved for heat and used sparingly enough that it still means something when it appears. Corner reticle brackets, monospace HUD readouts, scanlines and sensor grain do the decorating — the viewfinder language, not a gradient.
02
The spec table is the sales pitch
Every product page runs the same table, in the same row order, with the same units. That consistency is the feature: an engineer comparing two cores scans the same line on both pages instead of reconciling two datasheets, and products within a family are laid out as a column-per-model matrix so the comparison is already done.
03
Charts drawn, not embedded
Detect / Recognize / Identify range charts, and a spectrum map plotting both bands against the atmospheric absorption gap between them, are built from CSS hairlines and catalog data — no charting library, no client JavaScript, nothing rendering between the reader and the numbers.
04
Every path ends at an engineer
The three-step engagement model — assess, configure, support — runs the homepage, and each of the three application domains (land, sea, airborne and space) leads to the same place. There is no cart and no price, because the next step was always a conversation.
Technical approach
One catalog, checked into the repo.
One catalog runs the whole site
One catalog holds every product: its family, its band, whether it is cooled, its specifications, its comparison table, its range-chart data and its markets. Everything else is built from it. The catalog page, each product page, the featured lineup on the homepage and in the footer, and the machine-readable product data search engines read are all generated, so adding a core is a single edit and the published specifications can never disagree with the page showing them.
- One catalog, everything else generated from it
- Adding a product is a single edit, not eight
- Featured lineups and navigation maintain themselves
- What a search engine reads is what the table shows
Ten spec rules, enforced catalog-wide
Cross-product consistency is what engineers actually notice, so the rules sit at the top of the catalog file as a checklist the next editor has to read past. Sensitivity is always labelled NEdT and always expressed with a less-than-or-equal, never a strict less-than. Radiometry gets a row on every product, valued or explicitly marked unavailable. The long-wave band is always stated as 8-14 µm. Altitude is always 12 km. Digital zoom is always phrased the same way, and the one core that has none says so outright.
- Rules live in the source, not in someone’s memory
- Uniform labels, units, and comparison operators
- Every product carries the same required rows
- Named exceptions instead of silent omissions
Export classification with three states, not two
Every ECCN was researched and then triaged as confirmed, pending, or missing. Confirmed means multi-source or datasheet-in-print. Pending means single-sourced, or in conflict between sources. Missing means no source states one at all. Only confirmed codes are eligible to render; everything else degrades to “contact sales to confirm.” Each pending item is named in the source alongside the specific conflict, so reconciling it with the manufacturer has a worklist rather than a memory.
- confirmed · pending · missing, tracked per product
- Conflicts recorded with their competing sources
- Public cell degrades to a sales conversation
- Classification page built and parked until the codes clear
One moving part, and it tells the truth
Every page is built in advance, so there is no database and nothing to fall over between an engineer and a datasheet. The instrument palette and type scale are declared once rather than scattered through the site, which is why the design holds together across a catalog this size. The only live surface is the contact form, and it is built to surface a real error rather than pretend a lost message was delivered, because an unanswered technical enquiry is a lost programme.
- Every page prebuilt, with no database to maintain
- The palette and type scale declared once, not repeated
- Spam screened out with no captcha for an engineer to fight
- A failed message is reported, never silently swallowed
Key decisions
Why we built it this way.
Absent beats wrong on an export code
An export classification on a public page is a legal claim someone may rely on. Where sources conflicted, or a code was single-sourced, we withheld it rather than publish the likeliest answer — and shipped the classification page parked, not guessed, until the codes are reconciled with the manufacturer.
No count of cores, anywhere
A catalog count reads as a boast and goes stale the moment the lineup changes, so the site never states one — not in copy, not in a stat block. The rule is written into the catalog file so a future edit cannot reintroduce it by accident. We have held to it in this case study too.
Capability, not weapons marketing
The same cores that serve defense programs also track marine mammals from survey vessels, map wildfires and agricultural health from orbit, and keep drivers on a road in blinding dust. Leading with what infrared does, rather than with what it can be aimed at, is both more accurate and a wider door.
Nothing you paid for gets thrown away
The spectrum map was pulled off the catalog page because it slowed people down on the way to the products, not because it was wrong. It is finished, it still works, and it is waiting behind a link for the education page it actually belongs on, alongside the classification table. Work that comes out of a design gets kept where it can come back, so a later decision to use it is a link rather than a rebuild.
How it shipped
Reviewed by the people who know the hardware.
The catalog went through line-by-line technical review with MTech’s own engineers, and their corrections became the site’s rules rather than one-off edits. When they told us to stop stating a count of cores, that became a catalog rule. When they told us the spectrum diagram was slowing people down on the way to the products, we pulled it from the page and kept it in the repo. When a spec label was wrong on one product, we fixed it on all of them and wrote down why.
Change orders arrived as a slide deck and as a written spec, and each one landed as a single reviewable commit against the catalog. That is the payoff of putting the content model in the repository instead of in a CMS nobody audits: a specification change is a diff someone can check.
Built with
Technology stack.
Next.js 16React 19TypeScriptTailwind CSS v4MotionServer ActionsZodResendschema.org JSON-LDArchivoIBM Plex SansIBM Plex MonoVercel
See it live
Visit MTech Imaging.
Take a look at the live site — or tell us about a technical product of your own that deserves better than a template.