Imagining a sheet of paper as building site will give you a good sense for Irving Harper’s approach to graphic design. As the Swiss magazine Graphis noted in a 1953 survey of his print work for the Nelson Office, it’s an approach not dissimilar to that of an architect. “The page on which to print is regarded as a site on which to build…. Pictorial material, often broken into fragments, is organized by asymmetrical harmonies.” From his start working with Nelson in 1947 through his tenure as design director at the office until 1963, Harper brought a visual coherence and energy to everything he created—from furniture, to ads, to clocks—but it’s in the printed collateral that his approach to design as a total experience is most easily gleaned. Be it evoking three-dimensional spatial gestures into a two-dimensional magazine spread, for example, or turning a functional object like a clock into a graphic abstraction, or giving a simple typographic treatment the textural quality of a swath of fabric, everything he designs has a deeper sense of dimension.

Magazine Advertisement, 1960.