The last two days have been filled with revisions on the Identity Festival show posters. I think if I were to add up all the hours spent on this production I’d be somewhere in the range of 240 hours. I’m certainly not complaining, in this economic climate I’ll gladly take the work, I’ve learned to be humble in these times. The tedious production work eventually always takes it’s toll and I usually find my mind wandering. So where did I wander off to today? Oh, well, this little place I like to call “The Land Of AE”. The temperature is always 74°, skies are partly cloudy with a cool breeze, the water is nice and warm, and I spend my afternoons barbecuing over an open fire. It’s a pretty nice place and it’s invite only.

So why am I reviewing my own personal made-up island paradise? Well, after feeling drained from doing the same thing over and over all day I felt like I wanted to do something creative but was lacking the will power to get me going. A couple weeks ago I won a contest over at WPtuts+ and one of the prizes was credit to the Graphic River Marketplace. I decided to head over and peruse the virtual isles of the store for something I couldn’t live without (since shopping always cheers me up). I pretty quickly came across this Photoshop Action for creating 3D maps and it looked like something I could have some fun with. $6 and a few minutes later I had the Action, Patterns and some pretty cool map elements to build my own terrain. I took my logo from Illustrator and pasted it into a new Photoshop document, ran the action and tada! I had my own 3D topo map of “The Land Of AE”. I spent some time adding the finishing touches to recreate the landscape just the way I  envisioned it in my head. From imagination to pixels in just a few minutes.

Totally worth every penny of  the $6 in my opinion and I can think of a few upcoming projects I can use this technique for. [button link="http://graphicriver.net/item/3d-map-generator-action/308808?ref=aeveland" color="default" target="_blank" size="small"]Buy It![/button]

• Tweet