Well folks, here it is:

My new blog design.

ENJOY! the new black, gray, pink, flowery, sort-of-emo blog design ….

Design Patterns - Bridge PDF download

Decouple an abstraction from its implementation so that the two can vary independently.

This is one of my favorite Design Patterns and I've used it quite often when coding with GUI's. It allows you to completely seperate your GUI and your implementations of reactions to user input. For example, instead of calling a Windows MessageBox directly:

You create a "Bridge" class with a public "showMessageBox" function. You then have various classes for Windows, Mac, etc. which implement a message box for that specific OS. The Bridge class then serves as a bridge between your implementation and the specific implementations for the various OS's.

Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

From A List Apart.

Design Patterns - Abstract Factory PDF download

The Abstract Factory Design Pattern "provide[s] an interface for creating families of related or dependent objects without specifying their concrete classes." Sounds complicated, but is easier to understand with an example:

The controls on a skinnable program can be either red or black. The Abstract Factory provides the right controls to the rest of the code like so:

This means that the other classes in the code don't have to worry about the skinning of the controls, all they have to do is ask the Abstract Factory instance to provide the right kind of control and they get a fully skinned and customized control.

Design Patterns - Decorator PDF download

The Decorator Design Pattern adds functionality or features to an object dynamically. It's interface conforms to that of the component it is decorating which allows an unlimited, transparent nesting.