The basic visual design
The basic design Gratze created for Zotter chocolates was as simple as it was smart. He set a terse frame with a logotype as the particular feature of recognition. He set a picture field into the frame that could be renewed over and over again and by this principally attracted everyone’s attention. This picture field offered boundless freedom of design. Thus, there was no limit set to the growth of Zotter’s chocolate variety. By now, the Zotter assortment includes almost 150 different flavours.
Long before anyone anticipated that the art scene would rediscover pictorial art, Andreas H. Gratze introduced his imagery to publicity. The remarkable aspect about the Zotter design is the enormously wide range of different styles and stylistic devices. Stylistic liberty and playfulness distinguishes an artist, however, you can meet these characteristics rarely as fully displayed as it is the case in Gratze’s chocolate designs. Mostly, people look incredulously at all the different designs and ask more than once if they all could be actually invented by one and the same artist.
In fact, every image is an innovative conception. Josef Zotter doesn’t give any guidelines. Gratze chooses everything himself – style, stylistic devices as well as the colours and shapes that seem to him correlating appropriately to the certain chocolate flavour. However, this correlation never aims to pictures the ingredients but the visual record of complex aromatic structures of taste. Looking for proper synergetic translations from flavour into colour and shape, Gratze definitely benefits from his „sturdy“ job training as a waiter and chef. Although he gave up this job immediately after training, he remembers all the culinary tricks and is familiar with the most exotic ingredients.His artistic demands intent to find the appropriate visual character for each chocolate, creating a portrait of each flavour. This metamorphosis from flavour into image saves Zotter chocolates from their transience and edibility in order to take them out of time.
The Zotter assortment expresses a vital interaction of individuality and variety. The strong emphasis on individuality and the original character creates serial variety. These two positions are postulated as a wide-spanned model of personal thinking and social acting.
