Strategy when working with designer(s)?

Hi all, This is more of a conceptual based inquiry. I'm currently working on some projects which require me to build system 'X' prior to any (X)HTML/CSS/graphics are available to me. A lot of the time, I just garble up default tables/forms/images to replace what the designer will be ultimately adjusting. It's certainly a lot simpler to have someone come to you with the CSS/HTML and then building on top of that. I was curious how do you folks who strictly do development and not designing, strategically work with a designer in this fashion? Do you have a skeleton you follow or preload some existing templates and then code around that? If there's even a book which focuses on such concepts, I'd be more than happy to purchase and read it. Thank you kindly for any insight. - sf