One of the perks of being the managing editor at AIGA is spending my mornings reading design stories and calling it “work.” But not everyone gets to (or wants to) peruse RSS feeds like it’s their job. Consider this a hit list (as well as a few things you may have missed) of the most interesting things I’ve and seen, read and watched this week. You can follow along every other day on Instagram @AIGAdesign and on Twitter @AIGAdesign.

This week I…

…charge up my iPhone for what’s apparently design podcast season, at least if Design Observer has anything to say about it. They’ve got two new offerings available to stream: Debbie Millman kicks off a promising string of Design Matters with Tom Geismar, and Michael Bierut and Jessica Helfand start a monthly tête-à-tête called The Observatory. Consider my ears pricked.

…prefer Neville Brody’s newly renamed Research Studios: Brody Associates. Apparently clients just didn’t get what they were trying to do under the old moniker. “Five or 10 years ago most of our work came from clients that wanted a one-stop shop for everything,” Brody said. “But clients tend now to shop around for the different parts of their own output. We found clients weren’t quite clear on what we were offering, because we were offering everything.” (Pictured above: One of two typefaces Brody Associates produced for Nike for the England Squad’s World Cup shirts.)

…bid every New York City restaurant to hire ambitious graphic designer and hand letterer Lauren Hom, who Will Letter for Lunch—literally. Give her some chalk and a blackboard and she’ll write up your menu way lovelier than you can. All she asks in return is a meal on the house.

…get graphically informed by David Byrne, Nate Silver, and the other contributors to The Best American Infographics 2014 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), which proves that for information design, like poetry, “more isn’t always better.”

…watch the excellent new batch of AIGA Medalist videos again and again as we begin to roll them out each week. First up, Cheryl Heller. Check the AIGA homepage (or Twitter or Facebook) for updates.

…meet the first female typographer, Anna Rügerin, who defied Medieval notions of what passed for “women’s work” and took over her husband’s print shop after his death in the late 1400s.

…celebrate the clean and deceptively simple redesign of Christie’s magazine, especially because it’s the first effort from former Esquire creative director David McKendrick and former Wallpaper* art director Lee Belcher, who quit their day jobs to form B.A.M. Here’s to many more, fellas!

…applaud Hyperallergic for finding a fun and 100% original way to cover the Jeff Koons exhibition at The New Museum: taking pictures of security guards looking super bored next to some of his most graphic (and over-Instagrammed) artworks.

…dream up ways to DIY this new Sputnik-5 planter/coffee table by Russian design studio Plan-S23. No word on how much this oak and marble beauty costs, but you can bet the shipping from St. Petersburg alone is crazy.

…try to get to bed a little bit earlier each night after watching this recent TedMed Talk, in which neuroscientist Jeff Iliff describes sleep as “an elegant design solution to some of the brain’s most basic needs” (like clearing away the crazy amount of waste we apparently store up there throughout the day). So I won’t be sleeping in this weekend, I’ll be elegantly redesigning my brain.

Still have more catching up to do? Check out last week’s (still completely relevant) Design Diary.