My Imagination Runs Ahead of the Technology. This Week, It Almost Caught Up.

I sometimes think my imagination is running ahead of what technology can deliver. It is definitely ahead of my skills most of the time.

I have projects that have lived in my head for decades. Not vague ideas. Fully formed, 3D modelled in my imagination, waiting for the tools to catch up. I am the same way in a Scrap Store. Where people see junk, I see hundreds of possibilities. My husband will tell you my crafting collection is physical evidence of this.

Imaginory's book covers were one of those projects.

I positioned Imaginory as entertainment, not a learning tool. The audience is visual. They scroll YouTube thumbnails. A book cover is the first thing a child sees, and it has to earn attention against everything else competing for it. That means it has to look like a real book. Not a worksheet. Not a learning resource. A book.

After trialling several image models I landed on GPT-image-1.5 for its vintage illustration quality. Other models were too photorealistic, or too smooth -- modern cartoon rather than vintage illustration. The problem was that it could not handle text or reliably hold open space. At all. So our solution was to mask the title area and overlay the book title and author name ourselves. It worked. The covers were beautiful. But they were not what I had envisaged.

GPT-image-2.0 changes that completely.

Integrated typography. Reliable standardised space at the bottom for the author overlay. Titles that are part of the illustration, not stuck on top of it. And because we still render the author name as an overlay ourselves, usernames stay on our servers -- not OpenAI's.

This is getting much closer to what I had in my head. It just took the technology a little while to get there.

Every cover above was written by a real child on Imaginory. Their story. Their title. Their name on the front.

That is what this was always supposed to look like.