Personal Body Unit Index

Sharpen your internal sense of scale.

Personal Body Unit Index is a cheatsheet to use your body as a tool to measure things.

We obsessively measure things. How high is that coat hook? How wide is that table? Is that really 3” diameter tube stock? Instead of carrying around a tape measure, we use our bodies to measure stuff!

Personal Body Unit Index is a collection of 17 diagrams of the body useful positions for measuring. Take your measurements and fill in each area.

You probably know how tall you are, but do you know your fathom? That’s the distance between the tips of your fingers when you spread out your arms (aka wingspan).

It is really useful to have an intuitive sense of scale. Whether you're rearranging furniture in your house, or at a hardware store trying to pick the right diameter pipe fitting.

As designers, we spend a lot of time working on computers, handling raw materials and getting a feel for objects that surround us. Computer screens make blue whales and pinky nails spatially indistinguishable.

Our desks are cluttered with rulers, calipers and tape measures to constantly reference the physical dimensions of things that live on screens. PBUI is another tool to hone our sense of scale.

Personal Body Unit Index is printed by artist/printmaker Keegan Mills Cooke in Brooklyn, NY.

Dimensions : 19" x 10"
Print : Silkscreen White + Neon Orange
Paper : #100 Neenah Wrought Iron Environemnt
Origin : Brooklyn, NY

Inspecting a print after the orange layer was applied.

From Here down is the first edition of Personal Body Unit Index. Originally released in 2016. This edition was made as an offset print and was bigger than the second edition.

We saved the old one here for posterity :)

Living with Personal Body Unit Index as a reference chart, as something that you can peek at on the fly, helps build up your superpower sense of scale.

Think of this as an awesome looking cheat sheet to turn your body into a measuring device. 

Hang the poster in your studio, workspace, kitchen, bathroom, hallway, etc. so that glancing at it becomes a subconscious habit.

Che-Wei’s Mom often does this weird finger walking dance along the edges of furniture, fabric or random stuff. She knows that the span of her hand from thumb to pinky measures 18cm. So she can quickly size things up. We always thought this was funny, until we realized it was GENIUS and started to copy her.

We made Personal Body Unit Index so we can be more like Che-Wei’s Mom.

First Edition Poster Specifications

- Measures 13"x39" (228mm x 990mm). 
- Printed with 2 PANTONE® spot colors (Grey and Neon Orange).
- Printed on 100# Classic Crest Eggshell Solar White Paper.

Many of the 17 measurements featured in Personal Body Unit Index have historical precedence rooted in some ancient unit of measurement. The cubit, for example, is an ancient unit based on forearm length from elbow to fingertip. Other human based units included are fathom and span along with a bunch of other ways of measuring things with your body that we find useful.