Looks great Dan!

Yeah there should be quite a variety of patterned 3D shapes that will be a lot easier to construct with being able to build them in a flat plane to start out with.

For applying them on to a sphere it may be a good idea to leave a little bit of margin area between your objects and the top and bottom edges of the plane, because those regions are compressing down to just a single point on the sphere and probably creating some degenerate geometry there. Probably it's ok for stuff like rendering though.

- Michael