When making a two layer board with the bottom layer being a GND plane, should every GND pad for ICs and passives be directly connected to the GND plane using a via, or should I route all of the GND pins of components close to one another together and then use a single via to connect to the GND plane?
EDIT: Having a GND plane on the top would dramatically reduce the number of vias needed. However, this answer to a related question says:
You are right, there is really very little reason to use both the top and bottom of a two layer board for ground.
What I usually do for two layer boards is to put as much of the interconnects as possible on the top layer. This is where the pins of the parts are already anyway, so is the logical layer to use to connect them. Unfortunately you usually can't route everything on a single layer. Paying attention and thinking carefully about part placement will help with this, but in the general case it is not possible to route everything in one plane. I then use the bottom plane for short "jumpers" only when needed to make the routing work. The bottom plane is otherwise ground.