Reissue of Humanscale

Reissue of Humanscale

We’ve had many great books that come through the doors here at Counter-Print. Many we happily have a browse through, document them, put them on the site and sell them on. We’re not precious and we rarely get attached. Some books however, you just know you won’t see again. One such book was Henry Dreyfuss’ 'The Measure of Man', which had a full size fold-out poster of the human form inside, as well as many beautiful diagrams and images.

For this reason, I was delighted to find out this week that there has been a successful Kickstarter campaign to reissue Dreyfuss’ other seminal piece, ‘Humanscale’.

In the golden age of American industrial design, Henry Dreyfuss Associates knew that there was more to design than just looking good. Products had to be good, crafted to work with the people who use them.

With this in mind, HDA designers Niels Diffrient and Alvin R. Tilley created Humanscale, including its ingenious data selectors, providing access to over 60,000 human factors data points in one easily referenced, user-friendly ‘portfolio of information’.

Humanscale has long been out of print and now IA Collaborative are bringing it back.

With these three beautiful booklets and nine two-sided, interactive data selectors, designers, engineers, architects and inventors can reference data that serves as a starting point to design products for people.

Never before or since has there been such a complete and usable compendium of human factors data. Each page is a master class in information design; and this was before computer layouts!

These iconic, beautifully designed, and visionary tools to design for people are still so relevant today. Published between 1974 and 1981, the materials have been out of print for decades and fetch extremely high prices on the vintage market due to their scarcity.

Back the Kickstarter campaign here.


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