This had to have been meant slightly tongue-in-cheek at the time… hadn’t it? Bespectacled man, meet Vitruvian lady.
The cartoon couple are from an ad in the October 1964 issue of Informational Display, based on drawings by industrial designer Walter Koch. These show how human bodies of both types should determine the size and shape of vertical informational displays, with the helpful description:
The drawings show one of the basic limitations imposed on vertical display areas by physical size of people. Studies show that the effective viewing area of most people is only about 30% of the total of most floor-standing vertical displays. We suspect this data is of interest to readers outside the vending machine industry since human engineering deals in one universal factor: people.
It’s one small corner of a full-page ad for Industrial Electronic Engineers, Inc. I like the way it’s very much of its era, though. There are a lot of diagrams in this one ad. It seems like IEE really cared a lot about rear-projection displays, both how they’re seen and how much information they can convey. And this in age before CGI, when we’re basically shining lights through pieces of plastic with letters and pictures on them.
Can you see this? Can you tell what it means?