The search and find book is here

As a child I spent hours searching in search and find books. My favourites were the market square and the farm. Every time you flip through, you find something new.

Now you can look for yourself in a book like that, or Granny, or your own dog, somewhere among lots of other people.

Since 30 October there's the search and find book. You set up the characters just like for the picture book. That can be your own child, the family, friends, but also an imaginary creature or the cuddly toy. Then you pick the places, and on every double page the characters are hidden somewhere.

You can upload photos for the characters, and for the places too. For example of the playground round the corner or of the holiday home from last summer. Then you search for your own holiday in the book again, and the whole family is in it. I think that's a really lovely gift, and everyone at the table has fun with it, the little ones just as much as Grandad.

I underestimated how hard it is. In the picture book the character is usually shown large. In the search and find book they're tiny, tucked in among lots of other people, and still have to look the same on every double page.

Then there's the hiding. An image AI doesn't always paint a character exactly where you want them. But anyone who taps “Show me Grandad” in the book wants to see exactly Grandad. I spent a lot of evenings on that.

On top of that, a double page like this is huge for printing. It needs many times the pixels of a normal book page so that even the small characters at the edge are sharp. That takes a lot of computing time. Painting a whole search and find book therefore takes much longer than a picture book, and every page is checked once more afterwards.

I'm not finished yet. The characters should look even more like the photo, and more characters should fit on one page. The first search and find book also brought the first wish: one family wanted everyone to really be findable on every page. That works now.

I do most of it in the evening when my son is asleep, often until late at night. Then I look at double pages and search myself.