A first convolutional coder (building-block trellis coder) is used to establish a minimum squared Euclidian distance (MSED) between signal points within a coded constellation building block. A second convolutional encoder (tiling encoder) is designed to ensure that the building block's MSED is maintained between building blocks once they are tiled onto an integer lattice. When this approach is applied to the trellis code of the WiMAX standard, a 3 dB coding is realized. Recall that Wei's 16-state 4D code suffered from a 1.36 dB due to constellation expansion, resulting in a net 4.66 dB coding gain. Our building block approach recovers 1.33 dB of this loss with only a minor increase in coding complexity. We then use the building block approach to derive simpler and more powerful higher dimensional codes that provide further gains still over the Wei family of multidimensional codes.