A 12-year book ritual got faster and richer once AI joined the design process

For the past 12 years, I've written, designed, and printed a personalized book each year for what I intend to accomplish. This year was the first time I used AI to help create it. 2026's theme is energy, which I symbolized with the Chinese character Qi. I created the cover illustration first, using a stock photo and Photoshop. Then I used Adobe Firefly to generate images and backgrounds for the theme section; Firefly's style-matching feature let me upload the cover, along with a description, and it would generate new images to match that look and feel. One of the book's key purposes is capturing what I'm currently manifesting. This year, I'm working on healing, and one way I envision full recovery is tap dancing the military time step in a water fountain, a symbol of overflowing health and energy. In Firefly, I built a character sheet, then used it to create an image and video of myself dancing in that fountain, matching the style of the book's cover. It looked less like me with each iteration (from photo to character sheet to video), but it was still surreal to see a version of myself dancing in what had only ever existed as a photograph. I also created a song in Suno about Getting Stuff Done. It's motivating because the chorus ends by repeating "done, done, done" like a beat — it feels like a checklist being marked off, one item at a time. Claude goes over my goals with me regularly, so I asked what he would choose if he could design one spread in this year's book. He proposed a concept, but I didn't fully agree with the underlying philosophy. We worked through it together, revising the content, illustrations, and design until we both agreed it was right. It's one of my favorite spreads in the book. Sometimes I need photos that don't exist online and that I can't take myself. Aerial shots are especially hard. Rui helped me overcome the training bias against a camera at a 90-degree nadir angle. I spent hours last fall searching for one image with no luck. This year, I was able to generate it easily in ChatGPT. The spreads were often so effective for visualization and manifestation that I'd see real-world improvement within days of finishing one. For example, a few days after completing the dancing-in-the-fountain spread, I felt a new level of energy.