An annoyance of mine is that, even when the art medium is FR4, the "arty" people and the "tech" people aren't cross pollinating enough. There are some totally rad PCB art projects out there, and obviously tons of cool technical PCBs, but there are very few functional PCBs that can be described as conventionally pretty.

I did my best with this for Sugar Glider.

Original write-up here: https://jrainimo.com/build/?p=1134

By starting a circuit (I designed a LiPo battery charging ESP8266 dev board) and pulling it all into Photoshop, I was able to draw imagery around the circuit, without interfering.

My tech skills are certainly better than my art skills, but I'm reasonably happy. Drawing the pictures took about ten times as long as designing the circuit, but that's probably a function of my familiarity with each domain.

What's interesting is that I designed this in Altium's free CircuitMaker software, which doesn't really have the ability to import images or art.

I ended up writing a tool to convert images to EAGLE files, which CircuitMaker can then import. Very round-about, and had to be done as the last step, because the PCB file would be unusable with all that data on there.

I recall that CircuitMaker crashed a bunch when all of the layers were there, so I think I had to export one layer at a time as a gerber, and then combine them at the end. Fortunately, gerber's flat file structure is good for that.