2600th

2025–2026 Case file

Little Wonder

Public personal product

I built Little Wonder to turn a picture of a child and a story they choose into an illustrated storybook with them as the hero, complete with a cover and a printable PDF.

My role
Creator and engineer
Period
2025–2026
Bands
Applied AI · Games
Editorial illustration of a child character and floating storybook creation tools
Editorial visual based on Little Wonder’s storybook workspace, where a child’s picture and a chosen story become a book.
On this page
Project briefPERSONAL PRODUCT

Make the child the hero, not the prompt engineer.

Little Wonder takes a picture of a child and a story they pick from classic public-domain tales, and turns them into a personalised illustrated book with the child as the hero. The book includes a custom cover and comic-style pages, and can be downloaded as a print-ready PDF from the browser.

The workflow behind the book

The visible interaction is deliberately small. A child picks a story and adds their picture. Behind that, the application has to coordinate several stages.

  1. Story choice and the child’s picture
  2. Page-level story structure
  3. Character and scene illustrations
  4. Consistency review across pages
  5. Cover, layout, and printable PDF
The book workflow, from a story choice to a printable sequence.

Each stage has a different failure mode. A coherent story can still produce a different-looking hero on every page. Good illustrations can still fail when text and image compete in the layout. A browser preview can look correct while a printable PDF clips content or changes pagination.

The hard part was continuity

The child needed to recognise themselves as the same hero throughout the book, and that mattered more than how good any single image looked. It meant carrying identity, clothing, visual style, and page context across several independent generations.

I treated the book as a sequence rather than a gallery. Every page had to serve the same story, and the cover and PDF had to feel like part of the same book.

Keeping the interface child-sized

The application hides most generation detail. The choices a child makes are the ones they understand: which story to be in and which picture to use. Model settings and production stages belong behind the interaction unless something needs the parent’s attention.

That constraint made Little Wonder a useful product exercise. The system does several technical things, but the person using it should feel that they are making a book.