About

Who doesn't love a wonderful, good-looking sign showing distances to nearby or faraway places? It brings harmony and joy. I personally love them. They always inspire me and spark dreams of travel and adventure.

How It Started

The idea for this app began when I had to renovate a sign my dad built about 40 years ago. It needed a facelift and serious restoration. During the process, I wanted to replace some of the locations with new ones that better reflected my own life and experiences. My dad was a surveyor and knew how to calculate distance and bearing from earth coordinates using pen, paper, and a calculator. For me, that was unknown territory, so I wrote a program to do it.

The math is well known and easy to find online. It's called the Haversine formula. It calculates the distance and bearing — accurately enough for any sign — between two points on Earth using their latitude and longitude. That small program eventually grew into a full design tool with 2D previews, 3D models, and production-ready exports.

What Problem Does Tervika Solve?

Building a directional sign sounds simple, but the details add up quickly. Which direction does each plate need to point? How far is it to Tokyo, really? What angle should the plate be mounted at? And once you have the answers, how do you turn them into files your CNC machine or laser cutter can actually use?

Tervika handles the entire workflow. You pick a location, add destinations, and the app does the rest: bearings, distances, sign layout, dimension calculations, and export files. It replaces spreadsheets, manual calculations, and guesswork with a single tool that produces accurate, production-ready results.

Who Uses Tervika?

Tervika is used by hobbyists building signs for their homes, professional sign makers producing wayfinding posts for clients, and tourism operators creating directional markers for resorts and campsites. The common thread is a need for geographic accuracy combined with production-quality output.

Whether you are making a single sign for your backyard or producing a batch for a client, the workflow is the same: set coordinates, design the sign, export the files.

The Design Process

The app provides a complete design environment:

• A Master Template system lets you define materials, colors, dimensions, and fonts once and reuse them across the entire sign.
• 2D side and top-down views show the sign assembly with accurate plate angles and dimension measurements.
• A 3D preview renders the sign with PBR materials — you can rotate it, zoom in, and see exactly what it will look like.
• Export to DXF gives you CAD files with organized layers ready for CNC cutting or laser engraving.
• Export to PDF produces a formatted summary document for workshop reference.
• An AI Prompt generator creates structured text you can paste into ChatGPT, Midjourney, or similar tools to visualize your sign in a realistic setting.

AI-Generated Visualizations

Using AI to visualize your sign is one of the most fun parts of the process. The app generates a detailed prompt describing your sign's structure, materials, and surroundings. You can choose from scene presets like lakeside, forest, beach, or urban park. A reference image from the 3D preview helps the AI understand the layout.

That said, getting a perfectly accurate image is still difficult. Don't expect 100% precision. A result that's 70-80% correct is more realistic for now — the AI might swap plate order or change pointing directions. This is improving quickly as AI models evolve, and the app's technical views remain the production-accurate source of truth.

About the Name

Tervika is inspired by the idea of land and direction. The name draws subtle influence from "terra," meaning earth, combined with Nordic tonal elements that reflect orientation and place. It represents turning real-world locations into meaningful direction.

Support Tervika

Tervika is built and maintained by a single developer with a passion for signs, travel, and craftsmanship. If you enjoy using the app and want to support its continued development, you can make a one-time donation from the Profile page inside the app. Every contribution — big or small — helps keep Tervika alive and growing.

Thank you for being part of this journey.

Have fun and enjoy designing your own dream directional signs.

If you have questions, feature requests, or feedback, reach out at support@tervika.app — we'd love to hear from you.