This week’s Friday Focus features different institutions of society as design inspiration for the featured websites. Did they make you do a double-take too?

This week on Friday Focus: the most popular color on the planet, blue. After the immense popularity of green (and pink?) during the Web 2.0 wave, it looks like web designs are going back to everyone’s favorite color. And we have a bucket full of examples to prove it.

This week on Friday Focus: websites with a fair amount of texture and a lot of personality.

This week on Friday Focus: one-page sites that sure to tickle your design tastes. They’re both playful and well-made, so enjoy!

It’s eye-catching headers this week on Friday Focus. Whether you believe in making the most of the content above the fold or not, it pays to make the top part of your websites extra beautiful because it’s the first thing people see.

What’s the lesson for this week? Describe the purpose of your website in one fell swoop and you’ll go a long way. Of course, it helps to have a great design as well.

Can’t say there’s a completely obvious unifying factor to each of the design picks this week, but they all have beautiful, detailed illustrations in them. They’re all cheerful too.

You know that flaming text effect that was so hip pre-dotcom bubble burst, very Web 1.0? Well, don’t overdo it, it’s a bit tacky most of the time. Sometimes, however, it’s exactly what you need, so why not take a look at this quick and dirty tutorial for Photoshop? Let’s start burning that type!

Zoe tackles layers in Photoshop in this week’s tutorial. Layers can be very useful, both for creating graphic elements and banners for sites, and when mocking up a site before moving onto production. In this tutorial, Zoe works from a photo and adds some new elements to fit the project.

Wonder how those great Photoshop artist achieve their dazzling images? Talent, mostly, but it also helps to have the right kind of tools. That includes plugins, something that Zoe’s been dabbling with for some time now. This is her first look at the world, and she’s already found some extra juice for Photoshop to recommend.

Tired of boring simple borders on your images using old school HTML? There are solutions, and the most creative ones involve working with the images in question in a program like Photoshop. That’s what we’ll do now, so let’s snazz up an image using cool borders, shall we?

Adobe complains a fair bit about piracy of their software, and who can blame them? It’s a huge loss of profit. At least, that is what they would have us believe, but is that really the case?