Once Upon a Time: Jojo & Mafe

Editora Matrescência, 2025

Once Upon a Time: Jojo & Mafe is a wordless picture book conceived by speech-language pathologist Juliana Trentini and published by Editora Matrescência. The book invites adults and children to build the story together through the illustrations, nurturing language development, creativity, and storytelling skills in a playful, everyday-friendly way.

The main challenge of this project was designing the book to be read in two directions: front to back and back to front. In both cases, the scenes needed to connect coherently, leaving room for multiple interpretations and showing how the very same story can shift depending on the storyteller’s point of view.

To solve this, I created character-driven compositions with expressions and gestures balanced “on the edge” between intention and ambiguity, supported by beautiful yet neutral settings that hold the narrative without locking it into a single meaning. The result is a 52-page book designed to spark rereading, conversation, and imagination, and to serve as a supportive tool in educational and therapeutic contexts.

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