Over at AdaptiveThemes we've been hammering out how to give our designers better tools for designing for Drupal. At first we thought about a set of briefs, then that grew into packages (brief + stock images, logo etc) and then I struck on the idea of Design Profiles.
A Design Profile is a package including a sample site (say a blog, business site, Ubercart site etc), PSD templates, a detailed brief and stock images (sample logo, photos etc).
The concept is that designers have a real site to design for, as opposed to designing in a void. Theres a second part to this. Because we collaborate to build our themes we're going to use these Profiles for the Themers development sites, so we have a seamless workflow from Design Profile to Drupal theme.
We really liked the stock template from mogdesign, which gave us a great insight into how this could really work for us.
I'll start working on the Profiles in the coming weeks so I'm posting here because I want some help with this, particularly in the field of Installation Profiles and how we might leverage them to help us out.
The Design Profiles will be available from AdaptiveThemes and I think could be a fantastic resource for designers starting up with Drupal.