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[Enzo]

1. Dig a big hole. Straight down.
2. Add floors as the need arises. Food production, storage, housing, workshops, etc
3. Ambushers! BUILD A WALL NOW
4.
5. Profit!!!

[dornbeast]

Then there's Reality, where one bedroom becomes 12x12 as I cut around the gem clusters that I want to save until my miners get better at their job.

If I'm not mistaken, gems are always mined out. (they are for me)

You've never trained a peasant up to be a miner, then?  I've gotten 4 gems out of a five-gem cluster as recently as yesterday.

[Captain Xenon]

my designs have slowly evolved to a point where things work well right up to 200+ dwarves with king. then it really slows down, but still works. im just getting a bit bored with the deisgns that i use now.

I take advantage of the 3-d nature of a mountain, and put my tombs and rooms near the bottom of the shafts. i end up with multiple stairway shafts, from soil to the lowest bedrock- my new design had a channel in the center, and a baby born in the stairs died as he reached the crypts in a very dwarven fashion. When i have enough z-levels, this means the rooms have more than 8 z-levels between them and the workshops high above. I get a secondary food stockpile near my legendary dining room and shops, very near the rooms.

that makes me wonder- how far does noise from parties, shops, and dining halls travel?

once i get 'big' i start looking to the un-mined sections of the map, and ponder how i can rebuild the entire fort even better there. (and if its the default 6x6, i have room- but on 3x3 i tend to fill it up). ive been slowly building bigger temples of armok in each fort.

so, mostly planning for me, a blueprint that reacts to local terrain and works well after a dozen tries.

[Shad0wyone]

With my first fortress I am in the 7th year, haven't gotten 1 mil wealth yet (due to a problem with a burning trade depot), with it I have only planned out small areas, and this giant wagon-bridge I built, my fortress is small for a 7 year, 89 dwarves, have a dungeon master, no baron(ess) or king, no HFS, from what I've learned from that, is that when you pause and plan out a large project over a long time, it takes even longer to build it if you don't have a large amount of masons or whatever.
Overall, I want to plan out small amounts, then build it, then plan, etc., but it all depends on whether you can handle having no fortress for a while, and on your ability to plan it out, and of course if you can withstand gobbos or whatever coming in. I would build a fortress good enough to withstand an ambush to begin with, then plan it out.

[Lord Dullard]

if you don't have a large amount of masons or whatever

Pro-tip: Give every single dwarf in your fortress the Masonry job. Then go to your Masonry workshop, hit 'P', and only let your actual mason(s) work there. Voila, you now have tons of wall/construction-builders, but they won't go and clog up your workshop by making crappy goods.

[Lalandrathon]

Though block factories you might as well use everyone for sinc eblocks don't have quality. And it'll give those lazy peasants something to do in their free time besides sit around chatting.

[Zako]

If they sit around chatting long enough, they can get legendary status in multiple things and recieve large stat bonuses! Though this wont work for the next update.

Can you post a copy of your blueprint? I would like to see it. Badly.

[The Doctor]

Well, there's the Plan, which has eight 4x4 bedrooms around a 6x6 square, with access from above, and the occasional bedroom replaced by a hall going out.

Then there's Reality, where one bedroom becomes 12x12 as I cut around the gem clusters that I want to save until my miners get better at their job.

None of my plans are, pardon the pun, set in stone.

For some reason, my miners always get the gem out.

Even my Kobold miners!

[Maggarg - Eater of chicke]

Planning?
My favourite fort is a hideous, inefficient organic mess.
A decade of poor to no planning.

[Maltay]

I don't plan everything from the beginning. Instead, I plan large projects as I go.

This prevents two things from happening:

1. It keeps my fortress from looking shabby, because the undertakings are big enough to be impressive and I make it a goal to try and keep the architectural 'flow' intact.
2. I don't do everything right at the beginning and get bored because everything is done.

Number 2, I find, is the main reason to avoid pre-planning EVERYTHING.

Before I saw Reinhammers, my primary goal was efficiency.  After I saw Reinhammers, I balanced efficiency and aesthetics.

Your second point was a factor in my original thought.  Though I enjoy planning everything, I found over time the rest of the game was no longer as fun.  Inverse relation established, I have yet to determine what balance of planning and reacting (i.e. playing) I most enjoy.

[Maltay]

If they sit around chatting long enough, they can get legendary status in multiple things and recieve large stat bonuses! Though this wont work for the next update.

Can you post a copy of your blueprint? I would like to see it. Badly.

I most often lose fortresses to temper tantrum spirals.  I draconically curtail the social lives of my dwarves.  Most new dwarves immigrate.  Rarely are they born.

[Slappy Moose]

I used to have a sort of starting template I would have, and as stuff happened I would build according to the geography but still in a way that I almost always do.

Now, I'm starting to try more aesthetically pleasing and military-themed bases. For example, I've been looking for alcoves my last few games; I find an alcove and build into the sides of it, with a meeting area in the middle and workshops all around the fringes. Deeper underground and further into the hill I put rooms, storage, etc. I also wall off the  alcove tips, and make gates.

It looks awesome and it's pretty efficient. My next idea is to take this even further by making it all dwarf-made, and instead of needing a natural alcove, being able to build anywhere. I won't say how though since I don't want someone to steal my idea 

[Pie]

Basically, as soon as I embark I improvise what I need, without having a sort of "meta-plan", but I make it aesthetically pleasing and symmetrical (usually), while leaving non-specific space to expand. So I would build say a few bedrooms, but I would leave space to expand it later, without actually knowing what the hell I would do. It seems to work pretty well, as your dwarves are never really working on something that won't benefit them in the near future. However, I am doing a meta-plan for a megafortress that I am designing...

[Jim Groovester]

I mentally designate large amounts of areas for what I want to put in: bedrooms here, workshops there. Then I figure out a nice design that maximizes the amount of space in the area I've mentally designated. If I need more room, there's always a level below or above to expand.

Though I'm going to move away from that in my next fort, and instead plan it almost entirely from the beginning, except in a way that makes it looks like the inhabitants of the fort reactively hacked it out from the stone. This is because I'm going to throw in a whole bunch of cool stuff that a group of explorers could potentially discover in the course community game, and planning is the only way that would work.

[Awayfarer]

I more or less plan as I go. I like to build my forts around features such as veins. Nothing classier than a native gold hallway.