I’m speaking here primarily from my experiences as a UI designer, so take this as you will. I’ve been doing some reading recently in About Face 3, a great book by the way, highly recommended. It brought together some thoughts I’d been having and, so, inspired this post. So what do I think the all important tool is?
I sat down and stylized some images from NASA’s Blue Marble project and this is the result. Looks like a nice place to live, doesn’t it?
Well, this is mostly the result of playing with some texture combinations, and some masking techniques. I liked how it turned out, and apparently so did some other folks since I’ve had lots of requests. So, here it is, enjoy! Full size is 2560×1600 for those of you with really big monitors.