The 1970s has been a frequently revisited decade in the design world lately, most notably in the resurgence of reissued graphic standards manuals from that era. For many graphic designers, the reissues stoke nostalgia for a time when corporate identity design was experiencing a golden age and when even the government valued effective branding. But beyond offering up a slice of design history for appreciation, there’s not much utility in these manuals; once guidelines for companies applying a new visual system, they are now beautiful coffee table books for idly flipping through.
Not so for the Humanscale reissue, the latest vintage design manual to be released on Kickstarter. Created between 1974 and 1981 by the office of industrial design pioneer Henry Dreyfuss—the firm known for designing everything from Bell System’s first telephones to the Hoover vacuum and John Deere tractors—the Humanscale sets were meant to be the product designer’s bible. They contain thousands of human factors datasets on human dimensions, seating standards, wheelchair access guidelines, legibility principles, and other essential metrics for designers creating human-centered products and spaces. And even though the product design landscape has changed and digitized dramatically since the 1970s, human dimensions by and large have not. The data, and the ingenious way that data is presented, is still useful to designers working today.