The tutorial gives an overview of state-of-the-art design patterns approaches, focusing on those that support the development of frameworks. The tutorial also introduces so called hot spot cards. These cards proved to be a useful communications vehicle between domain experts and software engineers in order to exploit the potential of design patterns. Hot spot cards help in the early development phases to capture those system aspects that have to be kept flexible. Case studies based on Java illustrate how to apply design patterns together with hot spot cards in various commercial application domains.