I assume that you (Dan Vinton) have some knowledge in sw engineering and in design patterns an you are looking for the common practice in the MatLab world. For this purpose I would take a look at the GUI packages MatLab toolboxes such as optimization, curve fitting, etc. The GUI's of all these toolboxes come with their source code (they are regular MatLab scripts). You can also take a look at it or at the source code of several high-ranked GUI packages from MatLab Central. These will give you a good representation of common practice in MatLab.
