Quill

Quill is a picture-book studio I built for my own kids. You give it a premise - a character, a mood, a lesson, whatever - and it produces a complete, illustrated book: a written story broken into pages, original art for each spread in a single coherent style, and text placed onto the illustrations so the finished thing reads like a real book rather than a slideshow.

How it works

The generation runs as a pipeline, not a single prompt:

• Story first. A language model drafts the narrative and splits it into page-sized beats, with an art brief for each page describing what should be illustrated.
• Art with continuity. Each page is illustrated from its brief, with the style and recurring characters held consistent across the whole book rather than drifting page to page - the hard part of AI illustration.
• Text placement. A layout engine positions the words on each illustration, choosing regions that don’t fight the art and keeping type legible against a busy background. This is the piece I’ve iterated on most.
• A reader built for the couch. Books render in 9:16 portrait so they read naturally held upright on a phone, which is how they actually get used at bedtime.

Notes

It’s a single-user app - a Go backend with an embedded SPA and SQLite, running on my homelab’s Kubernetes cluster, locked to just me. It isn’t a product and isn’t for sale; it exists so I can make my kids a specific book on a specific evening.