A TEST PATTERN FACE SILHOUETTE
“Melipone is a mysterious character who’s being tracked by
Telepaths, but his identity is unknown, so they don’t know what
he looks like. We le the face blank to represent this, and so we
weren’t giving too much away. We imagined the scramble paern
around him as a kind of digital aura. Usually, auras would be
visualised with colour and light, but I felt that manifesting this
as an electronic glitch paern would be more appropriate to
Philip K Dick’s text.”B MAN IN HEX PATTERN
“This was an important passage for me, as it simplifies the
complicated concept of being able to envisage a variety of futures
and the ability to choose one of them. Each cell represents a
different path of consequences and is constructed from the
same elements – night, day and colour – but in each tunnel the
panel positions are shied, so that none of the routes forward are
exactly the same.”C LIGHT BEAM BEINGS
“One of the characters has a
dream about being visited by
sparkly beings who surround
her bed. We wanted this
image to feel like a sort of
hallucination, so it’s quite hazy
and dream-like.”D BIRD IN A WEB
“It’s an imagined scene within
the book, but I was touched
by the thought of a fragile bird
caught within a web.”E FRACTURED FAIRY POSTER
“Throughout the book there are references to advertising-speak,
and each chapter begins with a brief advertisement for a different
form of Ubik. This section of the book refers to a TV advert, but
we thought that it would be interesting to see how a poster for
the product may look. This image contains the only reference to
a spray can, but it’s only small in the hand of the fairy. Originally,
we were exploring ideas that incorporated a spray can more
prominently, but ultimately we thought this could end up being
too descriptive. We introduced the brand colours of Ubik in
the gradient on this page so it ties in later in the book with the
Skull spray image.”F SKULL GRADIENT FACE
“This is a key scene in the book, where the lead character is
sprayed with Ubik just as he is about to die. The spray ultimately
revives him, so we played with a graphic interpretation of scene,
with the skull representing death and the human face in the spray
representing life. The colours of the gradient in the spray shape
reference the Ubik advert earlier in the book.”ART THAT ADDS AN
EXTRA DIMENSION
Scot Bendall gives insights on his art direction for UbikADCOMPUTERARTS.CREATIVEBLOQ.COMPROJECT DIARY SEPTEMBER 2019
“One of the
characters has
a dream about
being visited by
sparkly beings
who surround
her bed...”