My advice for design: Design is hard. Good design is so hard that you will almost never see it in the wild. It becomes even harder when you work with other people. Your carefully crafted ideas will be crushed under the foot of the next confident programmer who thinks they have found the holy grail of design. As more and more programmers are added, they pour in their particular favourite flavour of programming sauce. The result is swamp water.
Good design is not about the code. Good design is about the people who are going to work with that code. Understand your audience. Get to know what they like and what they don't like. Write your code in a way that will delight your audience. Give them what they expect to see.
Of course, this is exceptionally shallow advice because no programmer can actually be so selfless. If you write code that pleases your audience you will usually have to do so at the expense of yourself. It is not possible to write good code that you dislike -- at least not long term.
So the trick to good design is always putting a bit of yourself in the code and always putting a bit of your colleagues in the code. It's striking that balance where you are satisfied, but also where they are satisfied. This requires working in small increments, and sharing what you are doing. It requires watching what your colleagues are doing and looking for opportunities to borrow. It requires questioning, evaluating, praising, explaining and coaching.
And if you are working by yourself: do whatever the hell you want. Why are you so worried about what other people think? If you are trying to improve what you are doing, don't do so by reading about the opinions of others. Read code, not blog posts. Write code, not design diagrams. Work slowly, try out ideas you've seen in other code and evaluate their success. When you get the chance, work with others to broaden your horizons.