Copycat iMac Designs Hot, and Apple Doesn't Mind.

What's white and bright blue, made of molded plastic, wildly popular among college and high school students, easy to carry and useful for storing information?

Apple Computer's laptop iBook computer, right?

Try Avery Dennison's Profile Binders, slated for release at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. nationwide for the start of the 2000 school year. Marina del Rey-based Stuart Karten Design created the look of the three-ring binder (whose cover looks almost exactly like an iBook) for Avery Dennison.

"The binders are the quintessential example of the 'iMactification' of design," said Stuart Karten spokesman Claude Meyers. "It's a pretty forward product for Avery -- they tend to go more conservative."

It's one of many products the firm has designed for its clients in the wake of the success of the iMac and iBook, which both use bright colors, translucent plastic and curved rubber molding instead of the standard putty color and straight lines favored by other computer manufacturers.

Besides Avery Dennison binders, Stuart Karten Design has used the iMac look on a number of other products, including computer cables manufactured by Compton-based Belkin Components, computer game cartridges for the Long Beach-based toy company Neurosmith and printers sold by Encad Inc.

All these designs have gone to market without a peep of protest from the usually litigious Apple.

In the past six months, Apple has filed a wave of lawsuits against various companies in U.S. District Court in San Jose alleging that its iMac design has been illegally copied. In July, Apple filed a complaint against Future Power and Daewoo, claiming that the companies are distributing computers that illegally copy the iMac look. In August, it filed a similar lawsuit against eMachines Inc.

But when it comes to peripheral products like those designed by Stuart Karten Design, Apple has given manufacturers its tacit approval.

"The basic feeling is that Apple has a funkily designed product here, but it doesn't stand by itself," said Stephen Baker, an analyst for PC Data. "Apple gives you a keyboard and a mouse, but if you want to get a printer you might as well get one that's the tangerine color of the computer. It keeps the market vibrant."

Baker said Apple is hesitant to manufacture such peripherals out of fear of overextending itself. After Apple went public in 1980, the company made a wide array of products, everything from printers to monitors to diskette holders, but shed such noncore operations when it started running into trouble in the early part of the decade.

Norman Yamamoto, director of new products for Avery Dennison, said the company test-marketed the binder among junior high school students in Los Angeles and Chicago, and the reaction was overwhelmingly positive.

"The kids took it home and used it for a month," he said. "Kids in focus groups don't always tell you if they liked it, but they'll always tell you if their friends liked it. This time, the kids were telling us that their friends tried to steal it. That's when we knew we had something."

Karten, the founder of Stuart Karten Design, attributes the popularity of the colorful, curvilinear iMac look to a variety of factors, including the desire to view home electronics as something more than an expensive commodity.

"I think (Apple) is adding emotion into their products," he said. "They're trying to add desire -- through color, through form, through the fact that with the names they are alluding to flavors. The iMac comes as a result of trying to offer more.

But Karten also emphasized that he doesn't believe the popularity of the iMac look is here to stay.

"As designers, we keep on looking forward," Karten said. "The translucent thing is definitely a fashion and a trend. Four or five years out, we're going to look back and say, 'Remember the late '90s, with all that translucent stuff? Ha!"'