Martin Fowler describes desktop patterns that I found useful
for working with Swing, especially "Presentation Model" and
the Model-View-Presenter (MVP) variants, and a bunch of other
less important patterns such as Presentation Chooser or
Event Aggregator.

Martin motivates these patterns and why one would separate
the presentation logic from the presentation in a longer text.
Just google for "Organizing Presentation Logic".

I provide presentations that describe the architecture
of the JGoodies tools and demos. These slides complement
Fowlers texts and pattern descriptions; my focus is on
the concrete Swing implementation.

My favorite pattern for Swing is "Presentation Model",
because Swing already includes a good portion of the
synchronization necessary for using this pattern.
The free JGoodies Binding tutorial contains source
code examples for using "Presentation Model" with Swing.
And so you can get the following for free: Fowlers motivation,
and his pattern catalog, my slides with additional diagrams,
smaller Swing source code examples. My presentations are here:
http://www.jgoodies.com/articles/

-Karsten