SharePoint 2013 Branding is all about the big question of using the newly available SharePoint 2013 Design Manager or go the „classic Master Page way“ of creating a design.
Funny Video and great for all the Design Guys who don’t know about SharePoint at all and of course don’t know about SharePoint Design Manager. Takes you only 3 Minutes!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU5juhG4uqs
Overview of Design Manager in SharePoint 2013
http://msdn.microsoft.com/de-de/library/jj822363.aspx
This article tries to answer the following question „Should I use the Design Manager, or can I do it the way I am used to with SharePoint 2010?“
http://www.sptechweb.com/content/article.aspx?articleid=51676&print=true
The best piece of advice I can give you if you use the Design Manager for your branding projects is to build your HTML mockups around how SharePoint works. What I mean by this is to create a laid-out page structure around what will be required for a fully functional SharePoint site. Create divs for where your search box will be, your navigation, and your actual page content. This will make life easier when you add your snippets as you will know exactly where these snippets should be placed. Also realize that once you have an associated HTML file, the branding work is just starting. You will still need to move, add and cut code to have a functional SharePoint site
Best practice workflow for creating a design in SharePoint 2013:
http://omicron-llama.co.uk/2013/06/03/sharepoint-2013-design-manager-it-kinda-sucks-its-kinda-good/