Henning Sanden and Morten Jager from FlippedNormals share this video on the importance of carefully planning your UV layout before getting into texturing your models.

“A Good UV layout will drasticallty speed up the time it takes to texture your 3D models. By making sure the texel density and rotation is good, your texturing time can be cut in half.”

This presentation is about Blender, but the same concepts can be applied to any 3D application, such as 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, SketchUp, etc.