I began my planning by reading through the two books listed in the previous post and started collecting in my head the types of joints I wanted to use in the design. I tried to choose joints that were interesting and that were not beyond my skills. It may sound odd, but some joints just called to me when I saw them.
After spending time thinking about the overall design, I decided to start more specific planning. I created scale drawings using CorelDRAW though I think now, Sketch-Up would be the tool I would use if I had to do it over again. It does a nice job with 3-d objects like beams and mortise and tenon joints.
Here are the plans I created for my 14′ x 10′ timber frame gazebo.