Any tips for designing/building low noise preamps ?

My experience is related to making tube based preamps.
For the lowest noise, I use an external power supply, DC heaters, and SMPS based PSU. I'm of the school that even with all the gain in the world, a preamp playing nothing should be silent at full blast, and I have accomplished this but only using external PSU.

Since you posted in the solid state area, I suggest using batteries for the lowest noise. A pair of 9V batteries gives 18V which is more than enough for the output of a pre I think.
Yeah, I always prefer to use external PSUs. In this case I used +-12v from a PC power supply.
I thought about an old databook I used to rely on from National Semiconductor called "The Audio Handbook" and low and behold I found a PDF on the web..you might enjoy..lots of cool stuff for us nerds.
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/components/national/_dataBooks/1976_National_Audio_Handbook.pdf
Thanks, books like these help me a lot