It was not until much later that Mr. Deskey's career veered toward the emerging profession that was to be known as industrial design.

''The mystery is that this particular man should ever have designed anything at all,'' wrote Gilbert Seldes in a New Yorker magazine profile of Mr. Deskey in 1933, ''for until he was nearly 30, Deskey's connection with art was either that of an amateur or of an advertising man, and the future he looked forward to was that of a sound and energetic American man of business. If he had not been by nature something of a tramp, he might have been chosen to do advertising for Roxy's theater, instead of designing.''

Mr. Hanks marks 1926 as the year in which Mr. Deskey's career as a designer began. His window displays for the Frankin Simon department store in Manhattan were noteworthy for their use of such ordinary industrial materials as corrugated iron and cork. His interest in such materials became a recurring theme in his career. Wallpaper and Plywood

In the late 1920's, Reynolds Metals, then a young company, asked him to find new uses for aluminum foil. Mr. Deskey came up with wallpaper that was subsequently produced by F. Schumacher & Company and Thibault.

Mr. Deskey also invented a textured plywood called Weldtex, patented in 1940, for the U.S. Plywood Corporation. This material was a result of Mr. Deskey's interest in prefabricated housing and was to be used on both exteriors and interiors to make surfaces more interesting.

Mr. Deskey, who had homes in Scotland, Jamaica and Florida as well as an apartment in Manhattan, was also adept at luxurious interior design.

The high-ceilinged apartment he designed in 1932 atop the Music Hall for Samuel L. (Roxy) Rothafel, the manager of the theater, is the only interior that remains of the dozens he created for such prominent clients as Adam Gimbel in 1927, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller in 1929 and Helena Rubinstein in 1930.