rattata – thea – arte – hehe … one day people in the town of St. Gallen were confronted by strange words on billboards. Observers soon deciphered the image as an anagram of the word “Theater”. Reinhard Gassner and Sigi Ramoser created this production as advertising for the new season of the Stadttheater St. Gallen. The elements of the game on the billboards were individual screen-printed letters that make up the word ‘Theater’.

Egg is the name of a small town in the Bregenzerwald, a region with a beautiful mountainous landscape in western Austria. In 2004 the local theatre association organised an international theatre festival. The play of words with the town name Egg and the English word “egg” offered the starting point for a visual game with a figure and an eggshell. In many applications, both analogue and digital, this pair of protagonists repeatedly carried out new tricks. Information fan decks and posters were important stages for successful productions of the ‘egg-shaped’ corporate design program.

Something that cannot be printed in offset, nine colours over each other in full tone. Displacing the font weight to one side, the capital letters of the word “KONZEPT” are printed on top of each other in a series of printing processes. The result is a concentrated density at the centre of the word and very beautiful tones produced by the shades of grey printed over each other. The image is both image and word; it serves as a poster subject for the exhibition of the Vorarlberg artists‘association: “KONZEPT 1” and, one year later, “KONZEPT 2”.

Working together with Sigi Ramoser Reinhard Gassner created posters and cards for the Vorarlberg paper trade that featured wet-impressed utensils found in the specialist stationer‘s. The posters were used as decoration in the windows of stationery shops, the card were sold or given away. The direct relationship between the tools and the stationery produced the advertising message desired, without the need for many words.

From 1997 to 1999 Reinhard Gassner designed the posters for productions by the Vorarlberg Landestheater. As the concluding work of this era a special poster was displayed at the theatre‘s main venues. Gassner chose 4 poster subjects, printed these and the words in their titles over each other in offset, apparently arbitrarily. The result was a collage with a surprisingly spatial effect and a striking impulse for the creative work of the theatrical season that was coming to a close. The subjects chosen were: The Lonely Road, The Taming of the Shrew, Die Liebe in Madagaskar and Nathan the Wise.

Incised illustrations drawn with a thick pencil, painted with inks and made directly on offset panels are one of Reinhard Gassner’s favourite areas of experimentation. He is interested in the analogous, the direct, the same size. Editions of 1000 and more represent no problem for printable works on panels: the erosion caused by abrasion is intentional and very much desired. In mixed forms Gassner often connects these lithographic approaches with standard offset printing through which static elements such as lettering or logos are introduced.

The goal of the new cooperative venture »european wood« is the joint international advertising of wood. In designing the trade mark the properties and advantages of the raw and processed material wood suggested blending the double o with the symbol for infinity. Traditionally, the lemniscate is the symbol for the cycle of existence, symbolizing the loop from material to space and back again – an appropriate symbol for all that is living and natural. If you look at it quickly, while on the move or when it is used at a small scale the infinity symbol seems to become the letters oo. The logotype derives its characteristics and its visual wit from this semantic-semiotic play with the meaning of “wood” and the symbolic power of the horizontal eight. This ambivalence also appears in the claim of the British member of the association: “wood. for good.”

A narrative typography that chatters away cheerfully: the task was to develop a system of graphics for large glazed elements in an administration building. The solution: word games with anagrams. The word anagram comes from the classical Greek “anagraphein” which means to rewrite or write again. A short text provides the letters that serve as the material for repeatedly new word inventions and combinations. The word games are, of course, nonsensical, but it is amusing to follow the transformations and to discover new contents time and time again. The game has a total of c. 3500 transformations, which were carried out in 111 text columns with almost 80.000 adhesive letters, font size 70 points, applied to the glass using a special sandblast film.