How I made a children book via AI (WIP)

UpdatedNovember 26, 2022

•2 min read

👋Hi there! I'm Bear, a designer who lives and works in Auckland, NZ with my daughter and wife. I do podcasts, blogging and videos between my work and family hours.

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I made a children book for my daughter via AI (Midjourney), which just took around 2 hours. I'm writing this post to share the thoughts, progress and tips.

My post on Reddit

As I work full time and parenting is also time consuming, the whole sharing will take a few more days to complete. I'll keep this post updated but if you are keen to know details, can leave your email here and I'll send you all the tips after I document them all.

Keep me updated!

You can download the children book PDF here [link to be added later]

Will AI replace my job?

This project started with this simple question: will AI replace my job?

I’m a digital product designer, and the moment I saw the quality of the AI-generated images, I thought: Shit! Our jobs are not secure anymore! Then I thought again, and this time the answer might be more positive.

This happened before, when photography came out, artists were challenged.

(To be continued)

My LinkedIn post on this topic:

A couple of weeks ago, I started to explore AI-generated content. The reason: there is so much relevant content on social media that you can't ignore, and I felt I need to know how it works for a designer.

I always think learning by doing is the best way of learning a new skill, so I decided to create something with AI support. Then I got this customised children's book for my daughter, Molly.

It's a typical design project:

talked to my daughter to understand my 'customer'
did some generic research on children's book principles and examples
ideated a few drafts on paper, and then create a sketch concept
(Then AI came to the process) used Midjourney to test the concept, page by page
used Figma (finally) to mock all the pages up.
drove to a local printing shop and asked the nice people to help me print it out
show to my daughter (yep, a design review), and felt so good she laughed so loud, "wow, dad! That's me in the book!"

I haven't explored further on AI-supported design yet, but it could be great potential for designers to free our minds on some tedious tasks and focus on those things that can create real value.

Attached the book if you are interested and sorry for some typos in it. Let me know what you think :)

#ai #midjourney

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Simon Espigolé3y ago

Hi Bear, I read the Reddit thread you linked and, as the general audience there, would like to know what kind of techniques you used to keep the girl so look-alike between different generations? We can see slight variations on her face, but it's pretty stable overall 👏

Anyway, looking forward to seeing all the details (and prompts, hopefully!) when you have some spare time to finish the article!

Bear Liu3y ago

Hey Simon thanks for replying! Yep a few comments on this and it’s on my todo list :)

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