MB: There was just something about the top hat's interior space that was compelling. I normally would avoid using a cliche such as a light bulb in reference to thinking or ideas, but I saw lightbulbs used in the set design. In reading the script, the pace of the story has a tumbling effect, as if all of these lives and voices are tumbling together. So that's the reason for the light bulb formed from falling people. The light bulb's swinging and the figure breaking away added visual tension.

See the next sketch by clicking here. 

JF: You produced 8 or 9 sketches for this poster/postcard. Can you give us a little commentary on a few of them, starting with the one to the left?

MB: There were many incarnations of the lizard man. Some with a short tail, others with a long spiraling tail, and in others the tail was hidden or revealed behind a curtain. Finally the face surfaced in the tail, and that had good potential.

See the next sketch by clicking here.

Matt Bouloutian, who designed the CHEKHOV LIZARDBRAIN postcard and posters, is one of the co-founders of moderngood.com, a multidisciplinary design firm based in the Philadelphia region. Managing Director John Frisbee conducted an email interview with him detailing the design process.

JF: CHEKHOV LIZARDBRAIN is a pretty complex show, and probably doesn't lend itself to easy representation in this format. Even so, there's a real uncluttered economy about your designs for the piece. What's your process for coming up with such simple, clean images for a project like this?

MB: With this project, the title is very expressive and mysterious. I think my ideas responded in contrast to that. Rather than doing an overtly expressive image I attempted to be bit more cool and reserved with the graphic presentation, letting the title animate the image. I also considered how well it would work “small,” which kept the overall image from getting too complex.

JF: I know you looked at the script and some images from the show, but didn't watch our DVD, but some of the designs are pretty sophisticated riffs on CLB's thematic content. What imagery seemed most important to you in starting to work on this?

MB: You had initially brought up exploring the idea of a double identity. After reading the script it was clearly a key idea to focus on. In addition, I played with ideas that dealt with the tension between our inner worlds and outer worlds. With these in mind, I sketched lizards, light bulbs, heads, top hats and groups of people. The top hat in particular held my attention as a container or inner space like a skull. I also sketched a bunch of lizard ideas out but most of those just seemed a bit silly. That's when I came up with the lizard man. Take 1 lizard tail, connect to guy, put guy in snazzy suit; it was kind of weird, but it held my attention. So with the lizard man as the main poster character, I played out a bunch of interesting ways of using him. Eventually the face made its way into the tail.

Read Part II of Matt's interview here.