Designing - A dilemma

Working on a few projects lately got me thinking about design paradigms.

In fact, it got me confused with it for awhile.

Since leaving the safe-haven of education, my designing skills have eroded and it is good to re-acquaint myself with it once again, at least of what I still remember.

At the current moment, I am using the factory pattern with a service layer with an interface join all the different objects. I do, however have the need to access a database, thus that makes the necessity for a repository to be in place.

I wonder if all I do at work is having this design pattern in place. It seems to be the case with all the projects that I stumble across. Is this the industry standard? Thoughts, anyone?