Just a quick post - it's Fair Day, and I've places to go and curds to eat.

SCIENCE World's smallest chameleon discovered. You have to ask: how?

COMMERCE Hurrah: Labelscar, the retail history blog, has a batch of new posts up. Been a while. This time it's a look at a New Jersey mall that looks like other malls, and you might say: so what? Understandable. But it's worth a click for the 1960s postcard view, which reminds you how that style fell so far out of favor you could bring it back, and people would swoon.

The latest post concerns Victor Gruen, the man who designed a little place called Southdale.

On the subject of retail: Some "bizarre and creative" package designs. They actually made the Kleenex boxes, but I don't think they sold well. Impossible to stack, hence hard to store. But this:

(I tried to make a Doritos-specific example, but memegenerator.net is displaying nothing but broken image-links) You may say that it takes up too much space when it's empty, but that goes for cereal boxes and Cheez-It boxes and all the rest. The only question: will it be half-full, like other chip bags? If so, why? Don't tell me contents may have settled during shipping. Just - don't.

If you're interested in packaging, here's another site . . . and here's another. (Man, Fry is really starting to bug me. But it's so hypnotic.) From the latter, some pasta:

There's a 30s vibe present in modern design, and it's been around since 2008. I don't know if designers consciously decided to revisit the visual vernacular of the Great Depression, or they just associate these styles with an elegant past. I rarely get the sense that modern designers know much about early 20th century design. Somehow it all starts in the sixties with a Volkswagon ad.