[lanceusa]

Sounds like you're doing it. You are looking for a way to make yourself a better developer and this never ends. I found eventually, that no one every really knew a good design. It seems like we always invented that along the way. Yeah, we all knew patterns etc, and were bound to certain ways of doing things, but somehow we seemed to always get lucky on most designs. It quite possibly may have been that the problems solved themselves eventually. And after we saw the code we wrote we looked at it made it better on the last few days creating, in most cases, an elegant design. The designs were more apparent after the project was done which were never consistent from project to project.

One way to learn good software design is to look at other peoples code who are good at what they do. For me those people are John Resig, Douglas Crockford, etc.