Home / Studio
A small studio in Kista, designing for software companies.
CleanDesignGroup was started in 2020. Six years in, four senior designers, an engagement lead, and a single floor of a converted office building in Kista, on the north edge of Stockholm.
The studio started with one stubborn idea: that the best product design work happens in small rooms, with senior people, on a small number of engagements at a time. Everything about how we run is downstream of that opening sentence.
Linnea founded the studio in 2020 after eleven years leading product design at a Stockholm fintech, where she watched the design org grow from three people to forty-seven. The lesson she carried out of that experience was not that large design organisations are bad; it was that there is a specific kind of careful, end-to-end design work that only really happens at a particular team size — somewhere between three and seven senior designers, on no more than ten concurrent engagements. Past that scale the work becomes coordination work. Below that scale it becomes freelance work. CleanDesignGroup is calibrated to stay in the narrow band where it remains craft work.
We do six engagements concurrently, on average. We turn down somewhere between forty and seventy percent of inbound briefs, depending on the year. We hire one designer roughly every eighteen months. Every engagement is led by one of the senior designers named in your engagement letter, and that person stays on the project from kickoff to handover. There is no production team behind the curtain, and there is no offshore studio we hand work to overnight. The four people on the team page are the four people who do the work.
We work mostly with software companies — SaaS, developer tools, fintech, healthtech, climate-tech. The studio has a particular fondness for the marketing-site rebuild, the design system bootstrap, and the focused product-UI sprint, and roughly three-quarters of our engagements fall into one of those three shapes. We work in English; Swedish, Finnish, and Danish are available if useful. About two-thirds of our clients are outside Sweden, with a growing number in the UK and the US.
The team
Four people on the page; four people on the project.
The full team. The person you work with on your engagement is one of the three designers below — and stays the same designer from the first call to the final handover.
Linnea Ahlqvist
Founder · Principal designer
Fourteen years designing for software companies. Previously led product design at a Stockholm fintech. Started CleanDesignGroup to do the kind of work she could not do inside a 200-person org.
Erik Sandström
Senior product designer
Eleven years on the product side of design. Came from a Helsinki developer-tools company. Leads the design system and product UI sprint engagements.
Annika Vahlund
Senior brand designer
Came to the studio from a Copenhagen brand agency. Quietly competitive about kerning and typographic hierarchy. Leads the marketing-site engagements.
Joonas Lehto
Engagement lead
Keeps the schedule, scope, and change requests in line. First person you talk to when you write in, last person you hear from at handover.
Principles
Six things we keep choosing.
Not slogans — choices. Each one of these is unfashionable in some corner of the industry, and each one of them we believe in enough to stake the studio on.
-
01
Read the product before drawing.
No file opens before we have used your product, read your docs, and reviewed your funnel data. Skipping this step is how good design dies in revisions.
-
02
Two routes, not seventeen.
We bring two distinct, fully thought-out routes — not a board of pinned references. Choice paralysis is not a feature.
-
03
Design the empty and error states.
Empty states, error states, the receipt, the unsubscribe page. The boring half is where most products quietly fall apart — and we treat it as part of the work.
-
04
Ship-ready or it didn't ship.
Every design lands in a build-ready file with notes for the developer. Whether you build it with us or with someone else, we hand off cleanly.
-
05
One designer, end-to-end.
No handoffs between juniors and seniors mid-project. The person who scoped the engagement is the person who hands it off.
-
06
Say no for the right reasons.
A brief that is not right, a route that is not honest, a deadline that hurts the work. Saying no is the cheapest way we know to protect both sides of the table.
Want to work with us?
Send us a brief. If your project is one of the engagements on our services page, we’ll quote within two working days. If it’s something else, we’ll book a discovery call.