The first deck, printed and laid out in a heart on a wooden table

Our Story

It started as one gift and an all-nighter.

One deck, one person, an unreasonable number of hours. Here's the whole story.

We have a gift problem.

Klau and I have been quietly competing over gifts for years, and neither of us will admit it's a competition. One year I got her a necklace, and with it a video of her friends, one by one, saying what they wished for her. She came back at me with a surprise trip. Flights, hotels, booked behind my back, my mum recruited as an accomplice.

Then it's my turn again, and I'm sitting there thinking: fine, I'm not beating that. I wanted to give her something she would keep, something that actually reflected who she is.

Tarot was not the obvious answer.

The actual plan was a set of vouchers for things I would do for her rather than things I would buy. Cook dinner on a Tuesday. Take her shopping. Give up a whole day and go wherever she pointed. Lovely idea, terrible packaging: what I'd be handing over was a stack of boring vouchers with my handwriting on them.

Then the eureka moment. Klau has read tarot for years. For her friends, for herself, mostly as an excuse to sit down and think properly about something. But the cards were never about her. What if I used what I know about AI to make a deck that was? Her face, our places, the jokes that only land if you were there. But I'm not an artist…

The timing was right. This was a year ago, right when image models had just about learned to keep a face looking like the actual face. So I got to work.

All 22 finished cards laid out on a table, each with a handwritten note and a sticky note naming its hiding place — Every card got a note and a hiding place. Deliberately blurred — those were for her.

Then I had to actually make the thing.

Twenty-four hours, no sleep, in a hotel room, on a work trip. Four AI tools duct-taped together: one to write the prompts, one to turn them into images, one to look at the results and fix them, one to expand and upscale everything for print. Every image went back and forth until she looked like herself and not like a generic AI model.

The files still came out too small to print, so I ran all 22 through by hand, one at a time. Then nothing would set the titles properly, so I did those by hand too. Then I found a printer, who told me the resolution still wasn't good enough, so I did it again. Then five more days writing the note that goes with each card. It was an objectively insane way to spend a week.

A close-up of the printed cards, each one showing Klau and Vlad as the figures

She laughed. She cried.

I thought she would be touched. I could not have predicted how much. Card by card, she could see that I had been paying attention. To what she loves, where we've been, who she actually is. That deck couldn't have come from anyone else.

Still the best gift she's ever been given. Still the best thing I've ever made.

Now it takes five minutes.

Somewhere in that week I accidentally learned how to make a card that looks like a real person and still means something.

One day Klau and I thought: what if we could offer this to other people? We couldn't stop thinking about it. Nobody should have to burn a week of their life and duct-tape four AI tools together to give someone this.

So we built the version I wish I'd had. You tell us about the person, we do the rest, and it shows up a few days later. Their face, their world, the details you'd think of and nobody else would.

If you want the full experience, we print them for you. Write what you'll do for them on the back. Hide them around the house and let them turn up one at a time over the year.

The tech is finally good enough to make something about one specific person. That's the entire reason we bothered. Every card is saying the same thing: I made this for you, because I know who you are.

Make one for someone you love.

It takes 5 minutes. They'll remember it forever.

See Them as a Tarot Character