70’s Design Manual, Responsible For Everything You Use Now, Is Set For Reissue
Image via IA Collaborative
The reissues of vintage graphic design manuals have garnered quite a bit of attention of late. Their slice of history enamors designers, and the fact that they make beautiful coffee table books has creatives oozing with desire. However, these manuals aren’t as functional now as they had been back then.
Cue the ‘Humanscale’ manual. The 1970’s booklets arrived at a time when design was merely to be appreciated with the eyes. The forward-looking Henry Dreyfuss Associates (HDA), however, believed that design was more than just about making products look good—they had to be good. More importantly, products had to be made for people.
HDA designers Niels Diffrient and Alvin R. Tilley then went on to create ‘Humanscale’, a set of user-friendly reference tools offering access to more than 60,000 human factors data points.
The markers in this revolutionary manual have since been the golden standards of many things you use today—which means it’s fetched incredibly high prices on the secondhand market since the materials stopped being printed in 1981.
Thankfully, global design consultancy firm IA Collaborative has collaborated with the manual’s owners to bring the precious collection back.
“These iconic, beautifully designed, and visionary tools to design for people are still so relevant today… After finding so much value using ‘Humanscale’ during the prototyping process in our own design work, we wanted to make them available at a reasonable cost to people everywhere.”
The set includes three colorful booklets and nine two-sided interactive data selectors that “designers, engineers, architects, and inventors”—or anyone intending to design products for people—can refer to. Head over to the collection’s Kickstarter page to learn more.
Image via IA Collaborative
Image via IA Collaborative
Image by IA Collaborative via GIPHY
[via Fast Co Design, images via IA Collaborative]
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