I really liked this post. I also have friends who have young children, and was inspired to give them a book like this. But everyone involved speaks Finnish, so I ended up creating my own.
I just got my copies from mail. It looks really unimpressive in these low-quality phone-camera photos of the physical book, but it’s really satisfying in real life—like Katja, I paid attention to using high-quality photos. For the cover picture I chose Earthrise.
(I’m not sharing the full photos due to uncertainties with copyright, but if you want your copy, I can send the materials to you.)
More information about the creation process:
I didn’t know where to look for photos, but Claude had suggestions. I quickly ended up using just one service, namely Adobe Stock. Around 80% of my pictures are from there.
I don’t know where Grace got her pictures from, but would like to know—I think her pictures were slightly better than mine on average.
I found myself surprised that, despite doing countless school presentations with images, no one told me that there are these vast banks of high-quality images. (Instead I always used Google’s image search results, which is inferior.)
Finding high-quality photos depicting what I wanted was the bulk of the work.
I had a good vision of the types of words I wanted to include. After having a good starting point, I benefited a little (but just a little) from using LLMs to brainstorm ideas.
To turn it into a photo, I needed to create images for the text pages. Claude was really helpful with coding (and debugging ä′s and ö′s). It also helped me compile a PDF I could share with my friends. (I only instructed and Claude programmed—Claude sped up this part by maybe 5x.)
My friends gave minor suggestions and improvements, a few of which made their way to the final product.
Total process took around 15 person-hours.
I didn’t want to have any information like authors or a book title in the book: I liked the idea that the children will have a Mysterious Book in their bookshelf. (The back cover has some information about the company that made the book, though.)
I really liked this post. I also have friends who have young children, and was inspired to give them a book like this. But everyone involved speaks Finnish, so I ended up creating my own.
I just got my copies from mail. It looks really unimpressive in these low-quality phone-camera photos of the physical book, but it’s really satisfying in real life—like Katja, I paid attention to using high-quality photos. For the cover picture I chose Earthrise.
(I’m not sharing the full photos due to uncertainties with copyright, but if you want your copy, I can send the materials to you.)
More information about the creation process:
I didn’t know where to look for photos, but Claude had suggestions. I quickly ended up using just one service, namely Adobe Stock. Around 80% of my pictures are from there.
I don’t know where Grace got her pictures from, but would like to know—I think her pictures were slightly better than mine on average.
I found myself surprised that, despite doing countless school presentations with images, no one told me that there are these vast banks of high-quality images. (Instead I always used Google’s image search results, which is inferior.)
Finding high-quality photos depicting what I wanted was the bulk of the work.
I had a good vision of the types of words I wanted to include. After having a good starting point, I benefited a little (but just a little) from using LLMs to brainstorm ideas.
To turn it into a photo, I needed to create images for the text pages. Claude was really helpful with coding (and debugging ä′s and ö′s). It also helped me compile a PDF I could share with my friends. (I only instructed and Claude programmed—Claude sped up this part by maybe 5x.)
My friends gave minor suggestions and improvements, a few of which made their way to the final product.
Total process took around 15 person-hours.
I didn’t want to have any information like authors or a book title in the book: I liked the idea that the children will have a Mysterious Book in their bookshelf. (The back cover has some information about the company that made the book, though.)
Here’s the word list:
A: Avaruus (space)
B: Bakteeri (bacteria)
C: Celsius
D: Desi
E: Etäisyys (distance)
F: Folio (foil)
G: Geeni (gene)
H: Hissi (elevator)
I: Ilma (air)
J: Jousi (spring)
K: Kello (clock)
L: Linssi (lens)
M: Määrä (quantity)
N: Nopea (fast)
O: Odottaa (to wait)
P: Pyörä (wheel)
R: Rokote (vaccine)
S: Solu (cell)
T: Tietokone (computer)
U: Uuni (oven)
V: Valo (light)
Y: Ympyrä (circle)
Ä: Ääni (sound)
Ö: Ötökkä (bug)