Michael Wolf Visser, Lead Content Designer for The Chronicles of Spellborn, has written a developer journal which uses the example of Quarterstone's Green District to explore the process of giving form to thoughts, and bringing ideas through to fruition during the design process.

The Shards of Spellborn
There are numerous examples of what comes into your mind and what makes it to paper in the Shards of Spellborn. The main idea and story line is so befitting freedom of thought and implementation of the weird and wonderful twists of a human brain that whatever you can think of can be accomplished.

This is also true for The Green District of Quarterstone, and this district will be the main focus of how some of my ideas became reality... to some extent of course.

When we first started off with Quarterstone, it was a city split into four different districts all of which connected to the main platform on which the Oracle resided. But after some thought and some time passed, more districts were put to the test and bridges leading from the Oracle to these new districts were built. The last district to be added to the whole of Quarterstone was the Green District, a place where the forgotten inhabitants of most of the city's populace still roam, albeit a bit mutated, and where the endless fires of the AIOR infestation still burn away at everything there.

Read more here.