Everything old is new again: many works in the Cooper-Hewitt's current survey of contemporary American design advance concepts in their respective fields by mining the past - Design

The willfully naive style of Maira Kalman is well suited to her illustrations for children's books, which she also authors, as well as her fashion drawings that resemble the whimsical paintings of Florine Stettheimer. With Rick Meyerowitz, Kalman created a cover illustration for the Dec. 10, 2001, issue of the New Yorker that became an instant classic; it shows the five boroughs of New York City divided into territories with such names as "Botoxia," "Central Parkistan," "Trumpistan" and "Psychobabylon."

Book designers are well represented in the show. As with Kalman, in some cases they not only design the publications but write or edit them as well. For the biannual visual-culture journal 2wice, J. Abbott Miller of Pentagram selects the contributors, with publisher Patsy Tarr, and creates each edition's distinctive look. Also notable by Miller is the catalogue for the recent museum show of Matthew Barney's "Cremaster Cycle." Exhibition catalogues by Lorraine Wild include the Michal Rovner and "Mies in America" shows at the Whitney Museum, and the respectfully innovative volume The World from Here, which accompanied a show of rare books at the UCLA Grunwald Center and the Armand Hammer Museum. Essentially books within a book, the catalogue contains two-page spreads of the opened rare books so that readers almost have the impression that they are thumbing through the originals. Literary favorite Dave Eggers makes an appearance for his journal McSweeney's, a collection of essays by different writers, which takes various forms, from boxed pamphlets to bound volumes. Each issue is designed and edited by Eggers, who also created the hokey cover for his best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

One of the outstanding animation selections is Richard Linklater's film Waking Life (2001), for which art director Bob Sabiston created an uncanny effect by "drawing" over actual film footage using specially designed "rotoscoping" software based on an early 20th-century animation technique. The result is an organic, continuously shimmying image that makes reality itself seem slippery. Other featured films include Planet of the Apes (2001) and How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000) for makeup design by Rick Baker, and the Virgin Suicides (1999) for the doodly title sequence by Geoff McFetridge, whose gruesomely playful animated spots for the Winter XGames on ESPN are also on view.

Among the innovative Web sites featured in the triennial are those by Alison Cornyn and Sue Johnson of Picture Projects. The duo's site 360degrees.org is a study of the U.S. prison system. Together with their site akaKurdistan.com--which aims to build a virtual national archive for the Kurds, the largest ethnic group without a country of their own--the humanitarian projects present a compelling use of the Internet. Other standouts include Amy Franceschini's digital creations [futurefarmers.com] and the Chopping Block group's engaging and easy-to-navigate sites for Tunmrclassicmovics.com and the bands They Might Be Giants [tmbg.com] and Phish [phish.com/farmhouse], as well as their own Choppingblock.com.