Buku
Around Christmas 1992, I came across personalized children's books printed on demand. I immediately thought this could be an excellent way to cover important topics, because kids would engage more with the stories if they were the protagonists. Because I cared about nature conservation, I decided to write and illustrate a children's book on that topic, with extensive personalization.
I had always loved writing, but after many years away from graphic design, I wondered how I would manage the illustrations. All along, I had in mind a central character: a robot with a magic widget who would take children on adventures. Because the main character was a robot, it felt fitting to use technology to illustrate the book.
To bring the robot and the story to life, I enrolled in a CorelDraw course to learn how to create the illustrations digitally and bought a Pentium with more memory than my old PC.
Escola Dolors Monserdà-Santapau, Barcelona.
Because this was a story for children, I wanted children to choose the robot for the book. After working on several illustrations, I selected a few and took them to my younger daughter's class at the Dolors Monserdà-Santapau school in Barcelona—the ideal age group for this story.
Their reaction was important to me because I wanted the character to connect with children right from the start. I was thrilled when my daughter and her classmates unanimously chose the cute little robot that would later become Buku.
Bukun. Calcutta Boys School, Kolkata.
My daughters and I thought the robot looked a little like one of my husband's childhood photos, and this became a family joke. When he was a kid, his nickname was Bukun, so we playfully named the robot Buku.
The first book featuring Buku was Buku i la Natura, published in Barcelona in 1993 in Catalan, Spanish, and English. Buku i les Normes followed the next year.
Years later, I found myself revisiting Buku i la Natura. Since I first published it, the environmental challenges facing our planet had become even more urgent. What began as a review gradually became a new book, Saving Nature.
Saving Nature is now the first book in the Adventures with Buku series. To reach as many children as possible, this series is not personalized.
In these stories, Buku takes Malena, Oli, and Samu on adventures that help children understand their world and discover how they can make a difference.