Product envy

It seems like there are thousands of sites out there that just list things that I really want to buy. Acquire is probably the best example of these sites. Every day there's some new product that I can't live without for like 20 mins. Example: this sled by Porsche Design.


I live in Dubai, and the closest we get to snow is the Mall of the Emirates, but I really, really want this sled. So I'm not too sure how much the sled costs, but I'm guessing it's out of my price range. Plus it's totally useless. Click here for more information about the sled.

So what do I actually need then? Headphones. I saw these headphones from a Parra x Perfect Unison collaboration about 2 months ago:


So, needless to say, they're stunning. According to High Snobiety (probably the best streetwear site on the internet), they're made of 9 single layers of Norwegian Birch wood. They're a limited edition of course. I only have two problems with these headphones:
1. You can't adjust them, which means if my head turns out to be larger than the average Norwegian, I'll feel like my head's in a vice.
2. The price: around US$445, which hurts.

So I need to find an alternative. Which is where good old Nixon comes in. The kids at Nixon have been making great watches and other accessories for a while now, and have just started designing headphones. I was on their site when I saw these:


Pretty great, right? Simple, clean, eye-catching design, and all for the low, low price of US$100. So I'm definitely leaning towards the Nixons at this stage. Plus the Parra headphones have probably all sold out anyway.

While we're on the subject of cool product design, I saw this link to the 100 best-looking cereal boxes over at (the always great) Bad Banana Blog. There are some great examples of old-school typography and illustration there, of which this is just a small sample:


Looking through that collection got me thinking about some more stuff regarding package design, but I'll be back with that later...