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[Overspeculated]

I don't really do designs, I just smack down some shit when I need it and try to build around it when its necessary. Makes the game quite fun having to deal with your previous builds. Here is an example of how I made an alternating corridor through a water-way.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[slink]

There's nothing wrong with starting rectangular, andrea.  It's hard to concentrate on making artistic construction when one has to stop every few months and deal with caravans, ambushers, seiges, and migrants.  Something I realized after reading a lot of forum threads is that some of the people building mega-projects have turned off invasions, severely limited migrants, and possibly turned off the weather, so that they have time to get the layout started well before taking on the rest of the game.  There is nothing wrong with what they have done, but we should not berate ourselves for making great creations more slowly while dealing with all the distractions from the very beginning and ending up with 200+ Dwarves with 16 FPS.

My own fortress entrances tended to start as burrows into the sidehill, and then evolved into square courtyards on flat ground.  Now I am considering combining the two into something more like a Dwarven mountain fortress.

My underground layout started as snaky 1-tile-wide tunnels with rooms where-ever they fit, and then evolved into strictly regulated orderly grids of wider tunnels and 11x11 rooms (subdivided into 5x5 for bedroom areas and combined for larger areas such as the dining room).  Recently I have loosened my grip on the layout and started allowing my plans to adapt to the terrain instead of forcing a square grid on everything.  One thing that changed dramatically was my sleeping areas.  Since Dwarves don't care about privacy and the walls/doors don't reduce noise, I have been giving the commoners 5x5 bedrooms in larger open areas.  The only reason for walls is to hold engravings, and they don't need those in their bedrooms.  They have the Royal Dining Room to supply that.  In return, they now all get cabinets because I don't have to make all those doors.

My fortresses that are still using the square courtyard entrance design have been learning to make pyramids overhead.  I have also begun making circular sunken statue gardens for outdoor meeting areas, with designs in the tiled floors.  For instance, Firechannels, founded by The Tufted Cats, has a floor design of the head of a cat with tufted ears.  These are proceeding quite slowly because of all the other distractions.  Firechannels has the pyramid only half done and the meeting area about 80% tiled, and the king has already arrived.  There is a nice obsidian-block road and a soap-paved brookfront, though.  I like to think of the Dwarves going out to bathe in the brook, pre-soaped by their walk to the water.   

Edit: Here's Firechannels in Year 11.  The fortress is centered around a 6x6 shaft down the middle, centered under the pyramid, and 6-tile-wide corridors from that shaft.  There are four 15x15 rooms centered around the shaft for workshops and stockpiles until the dining/sleeping levels are reached.  Then the rooms are much larger for a couple of levels.  Below that is the region of the nobles and royalty, who have engraved walls.  Farther from the shaft are oddly shaped areas such as the archery ranges, the obsidian experimental area, the forges, the shopping mall, and the three circular meeting rooms.  One is the outdoor cat-head statue garden visible beyond the pyramid.  One is an emergency underground statue garden, for use during lockdowns.  One is a now-defunct waterfall garden that had to be abandoned because the annual freezing of the waterfall mist killed Dwarves.  That is barely visible on the lower edge.  So, my designs have lossened up considerably from the rigid mathematically determined repeating square grids that I used for months, but I am not yet to the stage of fluid designs which adapt best to the terrain.  I have learned a lot about what the Dwarves need, and I am about to add some tougher opponents to give me a chance to develop more complicated defensive strategies.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Katsuun]

I don't really do designs, I just smack down some shit when I need it and try to build around it when its necessary. Makes the game quite fun having to deal with your previous builds. Here is an example of how I made an alternating corridor through a water-way.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This is roughly how I do it, but I've never gotten far enough along to see how I would deal with conflicting designs and such. I tend to quit faster if I try to actually plan the fortress out, so I avoid that when possible.

[Hungry]

The randomness....IT IS CHAOS!!!

Take it away!!! The horror!!!

..........

Oh, sorry, I got lost in that...

[Aspgren]

I don't really do designs, I just smack down some shit when I need it and try to build around it when its necessary. Makes the game quite fun having to deal with your previous builds. Here is an example of how I made an alternating corridor through a water-way.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

From the water in your hallway I can tell that the path is new. It's hilarious that a baby has gone missing at that precise time.
"I wonder where little Urist is..."
"Ah don't worry. She'll surface sooner or later."

[Overspeculated]

From the water in your hallway I can tell that the path is new. It's hilarious that a baby has gone missing at that precise time.
"I wonder where little Urist is..."
"Ah don't worry. She'll surface sooner or later."

The path itself isn't really new, I just "re-opened" it for the picture (raised the bridges and opened the doors). I'm currently keeping it open as the cistern is my pond, which I'm using, and because that waterway leads to another waterway lower down which I am also currently using, but which should be finished soon.

[Fien]

A short 2 wide hallway leading from my entrance flows into my barracks. From there it's a long 3-4 wide hallway with my main rooms radiating off of it. At the end it splits of into my living quarter hallways. My food stores and farm are located as close to my barracks or main hall as I can get them and  specialized workshops are build on an as-needed basis close to their materials or whatever else they'll require. It grows pretty organically from there.

It works pretty well but it can a bit of a deathtrap if I don't plan ahead. The good thing about it though is that it's very quick to build and easy to expand if I need more room.

[Vattic]

In my current fort I have a double spiral set of ramps from the z-level bellow the surface to the bottom of the map. The dwarves have rooms at the bottom, there is a z-level for farming, food storage and the dinning room. A z-level for military. A huge meeting area. Then I'm slowly expanding the number of industries in my fort and giving each industry or two their own z-level. I am limited by only having 3 and a bit embark tiles to work with as the site is only 2x2 with a magma pipe.

With my current fort I am not really doing anything that impressive, just running a fairly normal, mostly organic, fort. Mostly I have geared forts around certain themes and then limited the population and design based on the theme. Sometimes that means lots of planning beforehand sometimes not.

[Dvergar]

The randomness....IT IS CHAOS!!!

Take it away!!! The horror!!!

Aww, come on    I find that my forts are much more authentic if I just build as I go, it is just important to stick to geometric shapes and to always pre-designate several projects ahead of time.  Anything too mathmatical can be boring.

[Tofu]

I usually make my fortresses as compact and "cozy" as possible. I make large cities, housing countless dwarves in different and exotic places. Even though it might be inefficient, but I could care less.
I also seem to have a fetish for cool entrances, as illustrated right here (with explanations for those that don't usually use a 3d interpreter) :

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 

As you can probably imagine, it is awesome to send a single hammerdwarf into the crowd of goblins standing in the square, flinging them into the drainable moat. F*ck  yeah!

[Nexii Malthus]

Hmm, I have been recently getting very bored with rectangular shapes and have opted for far more natural looking layouts. I carve out massive caverns using ramps with pleasing organic shapes. Right now making one for my magma forges.

[Dorf3000]

Recently (last 4 or so forts) I've been making a temporary fort in a hill or other area than I plan to level out or excavate later.  Trying to dig out the final fort plan from the beginning takes too long and I don't have anywhere to set up farms, booze production, bedrooms etc etc.  So I hollow out a hill (mark all the 'hidden' tiles in the hill for digging, add in stairs, pick an entrance) and put in the initial workshops and bed area and stockpiles.  It's a bit more tricky to start a farm if this first hill has no soil, but due to my preferred starting locations it usually does.

After that's set up and running (2 seasons at most) then I start digging/block making/wood cutting to make the 'real' fort.  I don't want the intial fort to get in the way so once there's a good area to set up inside it I'll build duplicate workshops and farms, piles etc and then deconstruct the originals and cave in the whole thing to mark the 'grand opening'.

[Zona]

http://mkv25.net/dfma/map-7393-whisperknives

Behold Wisperknives. Its *Ahem* design is more or less normal for me.

[Dvergar]

Zona, level 10 of Whisperknives, what are those colored ovals on the bottom right?

[Retro]

Honestly, for me, I try to vary it up sometimes. My first fort was, of course, just "Hey, I could probably fit a Trade Depot there" while I learned the rules, my second was a meticulously planned like 128x128 underground hotel of sorts with a completely hollow central area and random-but-kind-cool crosswalks, my third big attempt was a megaproject with distractions turned off where I more or less just dug away the whole first soil layer and tossed beds and stockpiles wherever. The dwarfs were more or less all legendary consolers, so complaints (which made up like the entireity of EVERY SINGLE DWARF's recent activity thing) were deflected. It varies.

A few forts later, I'm doing the meticulous planning thing again, trying to dig as little as possible so that when I remove constructions and finish my... rather 'ambitious' mining activities*, the whole thing will look like this wicked purely natural cavern - I'm even using an underground river just for having an underground woodsy area sort of thing, and collapsing a whole ton of soil layers a looong way down for an underground beach by my lake. My temp fort is living in a completely hollowed out mini mountain just isolated from the main mountain range, with a dwarf-dug moat around it that fills from the somewhat-nearby brook (rather than just pump it underground, I've been using the mouse-draw tool to get some nice random curves as the brook actually forks and makes its way lazily over). Of course, having very little floor space and refusing myself mining out unnecessary area just to put 'temp' rooms, I've been awkwardly building rooms upon rooms as migrants come. It's getting a bit weird-- to get from the food stockpile to one bedroom, you have to go through one room, up a staircase (in the room), out into the main hall on that floor, through another few connected rooms, down again, then up a few floors somewhere else.

Of course, "temporary" in this case refers to... what, the next ten-ish in game years worth of digging? When I do finally take all the temp stuff down it'll all be glorious and 'untouched'.

So it varies for me. You can do all-in-one shape and look cool, make it up as you go, plan it out to look really awesome or really intentionally natural... it's all good. Personally, as long as it's a fairly consistent style across a fort's entire layout, things should still look great.

* for those somewhat curious, I'm digging out roughly 50z of rock in a probably 2x4 embark-tile area. Tee hee.