Choose a tile than meets your design needs and your budget.

The way a tile is made determines its cost, durability and beaut. If you're looking to redecorate with tile, it's a good idea to know a little bit about what goes into creating them.

Tisa Adamson, General Manager and Co-owner of South Pasadena's Mission Tile West, offers a basic guide to the different types of tile available:

• Machine made: uniform and inexpensive.
  There are a lot of categories of tile, but the easiest way to separate them is into two groups: machine made tiles and handmade tiles. Machine made tiles are very uniform and straight, so you can use very narrow lines of grout to place the tiles very close together. They typically cost less than handmade tiles.
  
• Handmade: unique tiles, richer colors.
  Handmade tiles tend to be less uniform, with each tile being a unique piece or art. Adamson finds them more interesting, because the colors are often deeper and richer than those of their machine made counterparts. Handmade tiles also change as they get older, much like hardwood floors do.
  
• Hand-sprayed: a good compromise.
  There is also an intermediary category between machine mad and handmade tiles. This category consists of tiles that are made by machine, and then given their final spraying by hand. Since a worker must spray every tile individually, each will end up being unique, and the price will be higher than that of a completely machine made tile.
  
• Big is less expensive than small.
  To cover a given surface area, it will cost you less to use big tiles than to use small tiles. This is because large tiles are easier to manufacture and therefore cheaper to buy, inch-for-inch, than small tiles.

For more about tile, check out the following websites:

Tiles on the Web
www.tiles.org

Tile Heritage Foundation
www.tileheritage.org

Tile Council of America
www.tileusa.com

HGTV: Fix it Up!: Ceramic Tile Floor
www.hgtv.com

HGTV: Collectible Treasures: Ceramic Tiles
www.hgtv.com

InfoTile.com
www.infotile.com