There was a tuturial in 'photoshop creative' magazine (I think) a few months back (or was it last year?) which had a tutorial about making a steampunk font based on gears and such. It involved finding loads of images on the web of gears , fancy stone bits of churches etc, cutting them out with the pen tool and then putting them together in a grid (desaturated) to make the type and then colouring the word when done. Very time consuming. I found this on google - looks bloody good actually, althogh it's not the one. (I never even knew an 'expand appearance' tool existed) and there's 3d app stuff involved.