Design and frontend links this week.

Into Design Systems: Online conference, live on September 28-30 - Live talks and demos on DesignSystems and DesignOps. 3 days, 17 speakers from IKEA, Volkswagen AG, Github and more. - IDS  Sponsored

Designing empty states in complex applications - Empty states provide opportunities for designers to communicate system status. - Kate Kaplan / filed under Interaction Design

The future of CSS: Cascade Layers - Let’s take a look at what these Cascade Layers are, and how we can use them to our benefit. - Bramus Van Damme / filed under HTML & CSS

Document as part of your process - Work to make your work visible. Make it part of your process. - Andrew Duckworth / filed under Design Process

System thinking for design systems - We put “system” in the name, but have we really look this from a system perspective? - Budi Tanrim / filed under Design System

Writing design - Thinking about design systems as vocabularies for shared languages. - Chase McCoy / filed under Product Design

Mastering the basics of icon design - Learn icon design basics in Adobe Illustrator from French Graphic Designer Adrien Coquet. - Jeremy Elliott / filed under Icon Design

I changed my mind about Tailwind CSS - So what’s the deal with Tailwind CSS and why did I change my mind? - Thomas Dhondt / filed under HTML & CSS

Designing beautiful shadows in CSS - Transforming typical box-shadows into beautiful, life-like ones. - Joshua Comeau / filed under HTML & CSS

Grainy gradients - Browse through Dribbble or Behance, and you’ll find designers using a simple technique to add texture to an image: noise. - Jimmy Chion / filed under HTML & CSS

A visual guide to React rendering - When does a React component re-render? - Alex Sidorenko / filed under React.js

Doodle ipsum - The lorem ipsum of illustrations. Just customize your doodles and grab the code. - Pablo Stanley / filed under Illustration

Basic pattern repository - A collection of hand-coded SVG patterns, ready to be used in inline SVG or however you like. - Thomas Michael Semmler / filed under SVG

Mechanic: Turn your design rules into design tools - An open source framework that makes it easy to create web-based design tools. - Design Systems International / filed under Design Ops

The flow state: How to get in the zone and stay there - The lack of focus is becoming a global epidemic. - Ivaylo Durmonski / filed under Productivity

The power of pen and paper sketching - Paper sketches force our imagination to fill in the gaps. - Tracy Osborn / filed under Design Process

Learning and being wrong - Discovering you’re wrong means you’ve learned something. - Jim Nielsen / filed under Inspiration