I have been working with SharePoint Design for a few years now but I'm not an expert.  I have been constantly learning and keeping up to date with as much information that Microsoft and the SharePoint community have been posting.  However, after many years of pure SharePoint design work, I've learned many new things.  The following list is 3 things that I have to learn the hard way.

3.   Not all designs translate easily to SharePoint

Many times I have received designs that primarily do not fit into the SharePoint world.  I don't mean to say that you can't make SharePoint look not like SharePoint, but there are designs that would require effort beyond budgetary constraints.  As you get more experience you realize what is feasible based on the amount of time you have.

2.  The design process does not start in SharePoint Designer 2007

Many many times my role is as a developer.  I am given a design and advised that I have 2-3 weeks to translate this into a feature (containing master pages, css files, images, etc.).  Alot of times even though the design is pixel to pixel what the client wanted it does not translate to a successful brand.  End users aren't happy or there is a disconnect between the companies image and the design they want to implement for the SharePoint intranet site.  All good designs start off with discussions, use case studies and wireframes. From there we get into prototypes, proof concepts and do more user studies.  Whenever this approach has been used by companies it has always been successfully implemented.

1.  Have a backup of your backup

As they say, the worst always happens when you least expect.  During my presentation today at SharePoint Saturday Boston, SharePoint decided to stop working for me and would not fix itself.  I realized that in the future, I should have a backup of my backup just in case the first stops working.