As a lead Software Engineer for a large organization I spend a great deal of my time designing APIs. I spend practically the same amount of time mentoring team members and evangelizing the benefits of a good design.

If you are a programmer than you are a designer; that is, you design class hierarchies and compositional relationships, determine whether an interface or abstract is needed and so forth. This is all part of designing an API, and the more thought you give to your design the better the results will be.

Conceptually, designing a quality API is pretty straight forward: all requirements must be satisfied by the design in a clean and efficient manner. However there are many details involved which you should keep in mind when designing.

Joshua Bloch, Principle Software Engineer at Google has published a very useful article which covers the various facets of good API design. If you are a programmer this is definitely worth reading. Check it out.