If you haven’t paid a visit to PSDTUTS this last week, you will no doubt have missed some of the best material that’s ever surfaced on the site. Web Design Week is concluding this weekend. I highly recommend that you review some of Collis’s wonderful tutorials and articles that are listed after the jump.

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  How a Turn a Texture into a Seamlessly Tiled Background

  Tiled backgrounds are great for both website backgrounds and in all kinds of Photoshop work. They are particularly useful when working with textures where you need a larger overall background than the small image you have to work with. In this quick tutorial I’ll take you through taking a texture and turning it into a background image ready for seamless tiling. It’s a useful little technique that’s been around forever. We need this technique for today’s other tutorial – How a Simple Layout Can Be Mixed ‘n’ Matched with Patterns, Photos and Backgrounds.

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  How a Simple Layout Can Be Mixed ‘n’ Matched with Patterns, Photos and Backgrounds

  It’s pretty amazing how much colour and background can change the look and feel of a website. In this tutorial we’re going to put together a quick, simple but effective layout and then create variations using backgrounds, photos and patterns. We’ll also look at how to make seamless tiled backgrounds out of a photo, methods for ending a single photo and simple ways to create pixel patterns. In short it’s a jam packed tutorial!

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  The 3 Components of Good Web Design

  Good design isn’t just about good looks, and nowhere is this truer than in web design. In fact it makes sense to think of web design as being made up of three major non-technical components: aesthetic design, information design and interface design. If you want to be a great web designer it’s essential that you have a firm grasp of all three.

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  9 Information Design Tips to Make You a Better Web Designer

  It’s probably the least glamourous part of web design, but information design is by no means the least important. Locating and consuming information is the quintessential web task, far surpassing buying, playing and communicating, all of which include a good portion of information design themselves. How users find and then avail themselves of all that information is affected by how it is structured and presented. Thus every web designer should be equipped to make qualified and informed decisions on just how to do this.

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  Photoshop Paper Texture from Scratch then Create a Grungy Web Design with it!

  This year has seen a big increase in grungey / textured / hand-drawn styled website designs. By nature I tend to design a cleaner look myself, but I thought I’d try my hand at grunge today and write up a tutorial on creating a simple paper texture from scratch in Photoshop then marrying it with a web layout to create a neat design.

  Then later this week we’ll take this same web design and I’ll show you how you can take remixing even further than just changing backgrounds and colour schemes, that in fact you can change the entire style of a design. But first let’s make our paper texture site!

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  14 Quick and Slick Portfolio Templates (via ThemeForest)

  Having an online portfolio is pretty much a no-brainer these days. But all too often it’s the old story of the cobbler’s children who have no shoes – or in our case the designer who has no time for their own portfolio. Whether it’s because there’s too much work on, or because you can’t settle on a design, or because you’re somewhere in the middle of building the “perfect” portfolio, sometimes you just need to get something together, and fast.

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  8 Ideas, Techniques & Tricks for your Web Design Toolkit

  As important as information and interface design are, it’s the satisfied feeling of designing something that just plain looks awesome that keeps us going during those times when the creative well is dry, when you’ve stared at a blank canvas for hours, when you’ve saved a hundred attempt.psd’s, and when you’re fed up of design. It’s because you know that when you have that finished, polished, veritable work of art up on your screen, and you’ve switched Photoshop into full screen mode and you’re looking at it from different angles around the room, and you’re basking in the glory of your perfectly positioned pixels, you just know that this is the greatest profession in the world!

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  Cliff Notes on a Website Redesign – Tips and Thoughts from the Creattica Inspire Design

  In this post I’m going to show you a set of twenty screen mockups for a real world project that I’ve been working on – the upcoming redesign and rerelease of our design and inspiration gallery FaveUp. I’ll explain some of the why’s and how’s that went into the design, how I use design mocks to spec out a web app, as well as some general notes on the design. The new site that we’re calling Creattica Inspire is now being developed by our crack Melbourne development team and will be hitting the interweb tubes as one of our first releases of 2009.

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  6 Interface Design Principles and Tips Every Web Designer Should Know

  Good interface design is like the air we breathe – it’s there when you need it and you use it without thinking. If you’ve ever used a bad interface design, struggled to get around a site, clicked away because you couldn’t figure out what was going on, not been able to complete a task you had in mind, or just been plain confused, you’ll know the perils of going wrong in this area.

  Websites are not pretty pictures, they are there to be used and consumed, so it’s pretty important that as web designers we spend a good portion of time thinking about usability. In this article we’ll consider some of the big usability issues and my tips for being a better interface designer.

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