Thank you for that lead, which led to the name of the CC industrial designer, the Italian Daniele DeIuliis, which led me back a step further to another of his designs, the PowerBook 5xx series. My 540c is presently secreted in a box somewhere, awaiting surgery (it refuses to charge a perfectly good, re-celled battery except very erratically). It will now need, in addition to fixing, a comparison, and eventually shelving and display, with its closer siblings.
I had previously taken it as a sort of brute fact lacking explanation that I prefer the machines of the 93-98 era aesthetically over the others, both earlier and later (with the possible exception of my G4 Cube, which was purchased new and as a piece of design for use in a public area of my home as well as for its function as a computer). I now discover that the 93-98 machines share elements of a single design language, though if you had asked me whether they did so yesterday, I would have sworn something purple that they did not.... There is not an obvious similarity to my untrained eye between the CC (which I now learn inaugurated the Espresso 'language') and a beige G3 minitower or a Laserwriter 4/600, but yes, there is a formal design language common to them all - going well beyond the sheer colour and medium of plastic - that has worked itself into me in unconscious ways. That is presumably why I prefer the beige designs of 1993-98 as a set, much more than those ghastly (and 'loud', stylewise) iMac G3s and B&W G3 towers/ G4 towers that came later. I don't even want a G3/G4 tower in the house, such is my loathing of their form. I confess that I have one tray-loading iMac (but it is in a cupboard). It's beige for me all the way, baby.
And yes, by comparison with some behemoths like a 20" ColorSync hooked up to an 8600, a little LC575 is just that.
Pic of the Color Classic and the LC575 for comparison here.
I had previously taken it as a sort of brute fact lacking explanation that I prefer the machines of the 93-98 era aesthetically over the others, both earlier and later (with the possible exception of my G4 Cube, which was purchased new and as a piece of design for use in a public area of my home as well as for its function as a computer). I now discover that the 93-98 machines share elements of a single design language, though if you had asked me whether they did so yesterday, I would have sworn something purple that they did not.... There is not an obvious similarity to my untrained eye between the CC (which I now learn inaugurated the Espresso 'language') and a beige G3 minitower or a Laserwriter 4/600, but yes, there is a formal design language common to them all - going well beyond the sheer colour and medium of plastic - that has worked itself into me in unconscious ways. That is presumably why I prefer the beige designs of 1993-98 as a set, much more than those ghastly (and 'loud', stylewise) iMac G3s and B&W G3 towers/ G4 towers that came later. I don't even want a G3/G4 tower in the house, such is my loathing of their form. I confess that I have one tray-loading iMac (but it is in a cupboard). It's beige for me all the way, baby.
And yes, by comparison with some behemoths like a 20" ColorSync hooked up to an 8600, a little LC575 is just that.
Pic of the Color Classic and the LC575 for comparison here.