With some of the people I work with, they think I come up with some of the designs and user interface components out of thin air. What I really do is look for patterns and best practices at other websites, and use them over and over again i.e. design patterns.

Smashing Magazine has a great (but lengthy) article about a topic dear to me — web forms. Web forms are the most important aspect of what we do because they usually lead to conversions, yet we spend so little time on designing them.