A product you cannot photograph.
Cognite builds an industrial AI and data platform. Cognite Data Fusion is the foundation that unifies and contextualises industrial data; Cognite Atlas AI is a low-code workbench for building agents on top of it; Cognite Flows is the action layer where those agents become working procedures — three products, one continuous argument, sold to the teams who keep refineries, grids and production lines running.
UrbanIQ worked on cognite.com — the front-end build, the design system carrying the product and industry pages, and the brand and messaging that decides how an abstract platform gets described. The difficulty was never the technology. It was that the thing being sold has no photograph of its own.
Chapter One
Entry · The Brief
Abstract product,
concrete buyer.
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Nobody sets out to buy industrial DataOps. They set out to stop finding out about a failing pump the morning after, or to stop three engineers spending a day locating a drawing. Cognite's own framing is plain about this — built for the people who keep the world running, from plant to patient, grid to goods. The site has to travel from a platform to a shift that goes better before anyone will read the architecture.
That pulls three ways at once: a page system that survives being multiplied by product, by industry and by role; three product identities that have to stay distinguishable under one parent; and copy about agentic AI that has to stay accurate as the category moves under it. UrbanIQ worked across all three, and on keeping them coherent as the platform grew.
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01
Node.Challenge Taxonomy
Product times industry times role.
Three products, a long list of industries from life sciences to oil and gas, and audiences that run from a maintenance planner to a CIO. Multiply those and the site stops being a set of pages and becomes a grid — one where every intersection still has to read as though it were written for the person who landed on it.
Writing each cell by hand does not scale, and generating them all from one template reads as filler. The system had to make a template feel specific.
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02
Node.Challenge Legibility
The invisible middle.
The sensor is real and the decision is real; everything Cognite does sits between them. A screenshot of a canvas full of time series, documents and 3D models does not explain itself to someone who has not already lived the problem, and an agent that writes a work package looks, statically, like a card with text on it.
So the pages lead with the job, not the interface, and let the product imagery confirm a claim the words have already made. The site has to describe the middle before it shows it.
Engineering notes
One system, three product identities
Data Fusion, Atlas AI and Flows share primitives and diverge only where they must — the accent, the diagram, the shape of the proof. A product is a configuration of the same page system rather than a bespoke build, which is what stops three identities becoming three codebases that drift apart.
A template that reads as bespoke
Industry pages run on a shared skeleton, but the parts that carry meaning — the named sub-sectors, the imagery, the examples — are specific by construction rather than swapped in as tokens. The structure repeats; the substance does not.
Precision about what AI does
Agentic AI is a category where the language runs ahead of the software. Copy that names what an agent actually does — retrieve this, draft that, flag the other — survives contact with a sceptical engineer, and survives the next six months. Vaguer claims do neither.
Chapter Two
Entry · Closing Remarks
A site,
that scales with the platform.
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The result is a site that carries a widening platform without re-architecture. A new industry page assembles from parts that already exist, a new product inherits the system rather than negotiating with it, and one section can move without the rest having to agree first.
Cognite now reads as one platform told three ways, at whatever altitude the visitor arrived at — the job first, the architecture when they want it. Making an abstract product legible without overselling it was the whole point of building it this way.