OS ANGELES
ON a hot, airless afternoon earlier this month, Geoff McFetridge, a graphic designer, showed up for a quick session at a skateboarding park a few miles north of the house he shares with his girlfriend in the Los Feliz neighborhood here. A slightly built 32-year-old with a mustache and a dusting of freckles, Mr. McFetridge climbed out of a Land Rover carrying a battered skateboard and wearing a dark blue "Hang Loose Hawaii" T-shirt. Rounding out his 1980's throwback attire were a chunky black Casio watch and a pair of red Vans sneakers faded almost to pink.

Just as he was about to tip his board into the concrete bowl, the park attendant yelled out, "Elbow pads!" Mr. McFetridge, slipping on the pads, just shrugged: he wasn't about to try anything that would cause a fracture. "It's not like when I was a kid, and I was desperately trying to learn some crazy new trick all the time," he said.

Once a week or so, he said, he visits the park with Mike Mills, a 37-year-old graphic designer and filmmaker. With a laugh, Mr. McFetridge said Mr. Mills's style is even more old-fashioned than his own. "Mike skates vintage," he said.

Mr. Mills and Mr. McFetridge are featured prominently in the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Triennial, a sprawling survey of contemporary American design that opened on Tuesday in New York. On their home turf in Southern California, they operate within what might be called the design-hipster nexus, a group of directors and artists whose résumés qualify as insider, but whose creative work — as varied as music videos and skateboard design — tends to celebrate outsiders. Both have had solo gallery shows in Los Angeles and are members of the Directors Bureau, a production company founded by Mr. Mills and Roman Coppola, a filmmaker and a son of Francis Ford Coppola.

The Directors Bureau is a sort of clearinghouse that helps line up work directing commercials and videos for its small group of principals. Its aim is to avoid the slickness of other Los Angeles production companies, but it has acquired a certain gloss in spite of itself.

"It's the most pretentious thing in the world to try and be unpretentious," Mr. Mills said, "but that's what we're trying to do."

To the teenagers who rub elbow pads with them at the skate park, Mr. McFetridge and Mr. Mills may well seem ancient. But to commercial clients and the design world establishment, they represent youth — or at least a direct pipeline to its fickle sensibilities. Mr. McFetridge created an animated graphics campaign in 2001 for the ESPN Winter X Games, a competition thick with snowboarding events, and is working on a watch and a shoe for Nike. He has designed title sequences for films like "The Virgin Suicides," directed by Roman Coppola's sister, Sofia Coppola, and "Adaptation," directed by Ms. Coppola's husband, Spike Jonze. With a partner, Mr. McFetridge is also starting a new skateboard company, to be called Atwater.

"They're not in this old model of graphic design where the designer says: 'I have a client. I assess their needs. I get my check,' " said Ellen Lupton, one of four curators of the Cooper-Hewitt exhibition. "The way they work is much more like an artist."

At the same time, she said, "these guys are very entrepreneurial — they want to have some control over the means of production instead of doing just work for hire."

That ambitious and hybrid approach to design work is a major theme — perhaps the major one — of the show. "Typically, graphic designers provide the spit and polish but not the shoe," Ms. Lupton writes in the show's catalog. "Not so for some of the most interesting designers working today. They are creating products, furniture, garments, textiles, typefaces, databases, magazines, novels, music, critical essays, films and videos. They have become producers, working to initiate ideas and make them happen."

Ms. Lupton called Mr. McFetridge the "poster boy" for that trend. Along with devoting the catalog's front, back and flap covers to his graphic and textile designs, she and her fellow curators have hung several of them in large wallpaperlike sheets on the second floor of the show, emphasizing the domestic setting of the ornate Cooper-Hewitt building, a former Carnegie family mansion at Fifth Avenue and 91st Street.

Mounting shows in a former house "has always been a challenge," Ms. Lupton said. "This time we're kind of going with it, saying, `Look, it's a house.' You can put wallpaper on the walls, only it's contemporary, crazy wallpaper. The tone of it is to make the graphics consume the environment."

Back in the front seat of the Land Rover, Mr. McFetridge wiped a few beads of sweat from his forehead. As he steered up one snaking road after another, the "Hollywood" sign appeared briefly between hills. A few minutes later he pulled up to the curb in front of a ranch-style two-bedroom house tucked into a hillside.

Inside, he kissed his girlfriend, Sarah De Vincentis, who is seven months pregnant, and talked with a couple of friends who had dropped by to give him a present for his 32nd birthday, which had been a week earlier. The house is modest but airy, with a long galleylike kitchen and a wedge-shaped fireplace, open on two sides, dividing the living room from a sitting room near the front door. A faded copy of "Landscape for Western Living," one of the Sunset series, sat on the kitchen counter.

A view of lush hills and of nearby Griffith Park was framed perfectly through a large square window in the living room. A mix of flea market finds and well-known pieces of midcentury design filled the rooms, along with art photographs and stacks of vinyl records. In the sitting room a bright-orange bird chair by Harry Bertoia sat next to a love seat covered in a fabric pattern, "Stoner Forest," by Mr. McFetridge. The décor seemed to celebrate a Southern California style of living that is unfussy but stylish.

Sinking into in a boxy blue thrift-store side chair in the living room, Mr. McFetridge said he had been surprised to learn that he had been included in the Cooper-Hewitt exhibition. "I just don't think of myself as part of the real design world," he said. "I mean, I've spoken at the Walker in Minneapolis before, but that's about it."

A banging noise kept interrupting him. He explained that he and Ms. De Vincentis had hired the architect Barbara Bestor to renovate the bathrooms. "We're having a baby, and babies need bathtubs," he said. "That's the word on the street, anyway."

Mr. McFetridge, who calls his design firm Champion Graphics, grew up outside Calgary, Alberta, and moved to Southern California in his early 20's to pursue a Master of Fine Arts degree in graphic design at the California Institute of the Arts. After a stint in freelance skateboard design, he took his first real job as art director of Grand Royal, a short-lived but influential magazine financed by the Beastie Boys. "Sometimes it was wheel-spinning, staying up for 10 hours doing one page," he said. "But I was excited, because I thought that magazine was the coolest thing I'd ever seen."

The computer design tools that he began learning to use in that job and has since perfected have let him take on a wide range of work — directing commercials for Japanese television, for example, and designing wallpaper and fabric for Ligne Roset, the French furniture company. "Basically every project I do is an experiment," he said.

Mr. Mills, who grew up in Santa Barbara, Calif., moved to New York City to attend Cooper Union. (He and Ms. Lupton met there.) He said his parents — his father is a retired museum director, and his mother was an architect — were disappointed that he didn't become an Abstract Expressionist.

Like Mr. McFetridge, Mr. Mills began his career as a graphic designer, working in his 20's for Tibor Kalman in New York, but is now concentrating on filmmaking. He directed "Paperboys" and "Deformer," both documentaries, and is trying to raise money to film his own adaptation of Walter Kirn's 1999 novel, "Thumbsucker," with Keanu Reeves and Tilda Swinton.

He has also designed skateboards and postcards for the Paris design boutique Colette, and has directed music videos and designed album covers for Air, the Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth and Ol' Dirty Bastard. One of his latest projects is a series of commercials for Volkswagen's Beetle convertible aimed squarely at people in their 20's and 30's.

As the banging from his bathtub-in-progress died down, Mr. McFetridge considered the décor in his own house. "When we bought it, there was this horrible old 1950's wallpaper all over the place, and we took it all down," he said. "But now, I have to say we're thinking, `Should we put new wallpaper right back up?' "

He said a few friends had installed his wallpaper designs in their bathrooms. But nobody has gone wallpaper crazy the way the Cooper-Hewitt curators did. Though his mustache marks Mr. McFetridge as somebody who is not afraid to embrace a revivalist trend in its earliest stages, he said he isn't sure about this particular one.

"Wallpaper in the bathroom is one thing," he said. "But wallpaper in the living room — that's the real plunge."