You Are The Star Books · Platform design and build
You Are The Star Books
For You Are The Star Books, I designed and built an automated book production pipeline on Google Cloud. Python services on Cloud Run layer characters, backgrounds and text into storybook pages, with a dead-letter queue for failed jobs and autoscaling that shuts down when idle, so the system can handle hundreds of thousands of book orders a day. Finished books go straight to publishers as print-ready PDFs.
- Client
- You Are The Star Books
- Studio
- Rigstore
- Role
- Platform design and build
- Year
- 2025 to 2026
- Tech
- Python, Google Cloud Platform, Cloud Run, Firestore, Cloud Functions, Cloud Storage
The challenge
You Are The Star Books makes personalised children's books in which every child becomes the hero of their own story. The personalised book platforms that came before were slow, expensive and hard to scale:
- Manual design and rendering meant books took weeks to produce.
- Customisation was limited, so families couldn't truly reflect their child's identity.
- Publishers needed to handle large order volumes with the same ease as a modern online shop.
What I did
I built a fully automated, cloud-native pipeline on Google Cloud that takes a family's choices and produces a finished book with no manual design step.
- Automated book builder: Python scripts layer characters, backgrounds and text into high-quality storybook pages.
- Processing on Cloud Run: book jobs are queued and processed by Python services on Cloud Run. Failed jobs go to a dead-letter queue so nothing is lost, and autoscaling scales to zero when there's no work, so the system costs nothing at idle.
- Front-end integration: the details parents and publishers enter flow straight into the back end, so each book is personalised in real time.
- Asset validation: automated tests check thousands of 3D-rendered layers for naming, colour layering and completeness, so a missing or broken layer is caught before it reaches a page.
- Cloud infrastructure: Firestore for schemas, Cloud Functions for automation and Cloud Storage for assets.
- Publishing workflow: single pages are compiled into print-ready PDFs and sent directly to publishers.
- Personalisation at scale: hair, skin tone, clothing, body type and family details can all be customised, so every book is unique and inclusive.
- Accessible typography: fonts chosen for inclusivity and engagement, including Atkinson Hyperlegible and HeyOctober.
- Motion capture and text-to-video: I also architected AI-driven systems on Google Cloud for motion capture and text-to-video creation.
The 3D character on this page is a demonstration of where the technology could go next: children designing a character that looks like them, dressing them for the adventure ahead and seeing them in 3D before stepping into the story. You can drag to turn it and pinch or scroll to zoom.
The outcome
- The pipeline is built to automate book orders at the scale of hundreds of thousands a day, scaling up with demand and down to zero when idle.
- Personalised book creation time fell from hours to minutes, and the cost per book from £6 to £0.005.
- The system is easier to update and extend than standard publishing platforms, so new books, characters, fonts and languages can be added quickly.
- The publishing pipeline cut manual overhead and costs for the company and its partners.
- Thousands of unique books can be produced efficiently, opening the door to both direct-to-consumer sales and large publisher partnerships.
