Helvetica-Guided Reflection

The documentary Helvetica reminds me a lot of my past experiences with many people, and it may sound quite odd that a documentary about a font made me even some sort of sentimental. It started with already one of the first scenes, when the documentary just showed the font, that I felt pushed back about 5 years into my 8th grade. Our history and art teacher was our tutor back then, and my first real "encounter" was with him, as I had to hold a presentation in history about the steam engine. One of my friends helped me with it, and when we wrote down the presentation in a PowerPoint he told me to use Helvetica as my font, as our art teacher loves this font, while he hates ComicSans.

And it happened that after I held my presentation when my teacher gave me the evaluation, he mentioned the font that I used and asked whether this was Helvetica and after I confirmed that it is Helvetica that I used, I got an extra point and praise from my teacher, so I felt happy about, and this now reminds me of how I decided to always use Helvetica in the future.

As of now this makes me really sad to think how long ago this happened, 5 years may not seem like a long time, but a lot happened during these 5 years that changed my life completely.

And I also felt reminded even more of my past as a swiss hockey player, as during the film they mentioned cities like Münchenstein, which was only 30 minutes away from my home and where I played hockey against some rivals. I felt relieved when I thought back at our, most of the time, successful games but of course also very sad as many players left our team during the last few years, and sometimes I just wish I could bring the guys back together to continue playing hockey. And these thoughts just often leave me speechless and very thoughtful for a long while until I start to recognize that there is nothing that I can change about as the past is the past and the future is the future, and the only thing that stays is this timeless feeling that a font like Helvetica expresses.

And this might sound quite surprising, but I really got caught off-guard with the idea of the name "Helvetica", because I did not know that it was originally planned to call the font "Helvetia", which means Switzerland in Latin.

And even after watching the documentary, I would still question myself, how can the feeling of Helvetica be expressed. Some graphic designer called it timeless and other said "it is just there", but I am almost certain that there has to be another way to imply the importance of this font. But this movie perfectly explains how Helvetica was invented around 60 years ago and how it became the famous font that everyone knows, and therefore we should spread this story of that font as it is the basis of many lives.