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About me

Senior UX/UI Designer

Design systems · Strategy · Design engineering

Portrait of Sabina Nordell

I’m a Senior UX/UI Designer and design technologist in Stockholm, currently at Bjorn Lunden. I work across product design, design systems, and front end.

My career started in editorial design and moved into product. Where I create the most value now is in making the next ten decisions easier for someone who wasn’t in the room.

Outside of work I’m a board game fan, breakfast enthusiast, and a wannabe artist who’s always picking up one hobby too many.

Contact

Want to talk about a product problem, or about design over coffee?

Email Sabina

sabinanordell@gmail.com

Focus

I’m currently interested in design systems that hold up in production, and in working out where AI tools earn a place in a designer’s workflow and where a trained eye still has to make the call. On my own time I design and build in code: Zabi Components, a Svelte component library on npm, and Zabiro, a CMS built with it.

Experience

  1. Senior UX/UI Designer

    Bjorn Lunden

    Dec 2024–Present

  2. UX/UI Designer

    Bjorn Lunden

    Dec 2021–Dec 2024

  3. UX/UI Design Intern

    Univid

    Oct 2021–Dec 2021

Education

  1. M.Sc. Interactive Media Technology

    KTH Royal Institute of Technology

    2015–2021

Career phases

My career so far, newest first, and how each phase changed what I paid attention to. The case studies are in Selected work.

Fintech

Design leadership

Senior UX/UI Designer · Bjorn Lunden · Dec 2024–Present

I have a lead role on the UX/UI team and work across several product teams. I also represent design on the Core team, a small group with one person each from backend, frontend, QA, DevOps, and design. What I pay attention to now is whether design intent survives into what ships.

Where the work goes

  • Looking after the shared design system: deciding what goes in, setting priorities, and keeping Figma and code in step
  • Working with engineers on design-to-code in Svelte, HTML, CSS, and Tailwind
  • Mentoring designers through critiques and shared standards
  • Using AI agents to build prototypes from the real components, compare Figma with the code, and draft component documentation
  • Teaching those workflows in workshops and by pairing on a colleague’s real task

Fintech

UX foundations

UX/UI Designer · Bjorn Lunden · Dec 2021–Dec 2024

I designed products for complex financial workflows, end to end. Each product had its own look and its own copies of the same components, so more of my time went into what they could share. I started paying less attention to individual screens and more to how teams made decisions.

What I worked on

  • Introduced user research and usability testing into the product teams
  • Built the foundation of a shared design system with designers and front-end developers
  • Took on the system’s tokens and theming, its Figma library, and its direction and process
  • Added analytics, and iterated on shipped interfaces based on real usage
  • Worked with engineers on prototypes, handoff, and design-to-code

SaaS · Virtual events

First product role

UX/UI Design Intern · Univid · Oct 2021–Dec 2021

A short internship, and my first software product role. I wrote the brand guidelines, designed flows, ran usability tests, and fixed what I found in the front end myself. Pages stopped being the unit of work. Flows and trade-offs took over.

Editorial · Higher education

Design foundation

2015–2021

I studied Interactive Media Technology at KTH from 2015. Alongside my studies, I worked in editorial design and illustration. At the newspaper Osqledaren I went from illustrator to Art Director and set its visual direction. Later I designed the editorial system for KTH’s Media Technology master thesis catalog, which gave dozens of projects one identity.

What stayed with me

Hierarchy, typography, and reusable templates. I learned to think in structure before I designed any software.

What I enjoy working on

I enjoy problems that don’t fit neatly into one discipline. The interesting ones usually sit somewhere between product, design, and engineering.

From editorial design to product work to design systems, the deliverable kept changing: a layout, an interface, a system, a way of working. The thinking behind it stays the same.