Your best design tool? DO NOTHING. Well, it works for design meister, erm, master, Stefan Sagmeister doesn’t it?

It’s been well-documented that Stefan Sagmeister – he of the Grammy Award for the Talking Heads box set design and the album cover artwork for such greats as The Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Lou Reed and and – takes a year long sabbatical every seven years. Currently on one in Bali, Indonesia – as in right this very second he’s relaxing on a perfect wave somewhere in tropical paradise – he is adamant on these little jaunts that he will not take on any work, even if it means declining to design a poster for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Instead, the Meister spends the year experimenting and refreshing himself as a designer.

Which is all quite nice and soothing for the stressed out designer… but most of us are just ordinary human beings who need to, like, eat. Which means we need to earn money. Which means we need to work most days, let alone take an entire year off ‘refreshing’ our design ideas. Which means we need to find our inspiration, design or otherwise, someplace other than an infinity pool in Bali.

And if that inspiration is just not forthcoming? (It happens, it really really does!) Well, then just ‘LET SIMON DECIDE’ what you’re going to do next.

Mashable.com has just put us onto ‘Let Simon Decide‘, which uses the power of mathematical algorithms rather than ‘gut instinct’, ‘sixth sense’, ‘too many glasses of wine’ or ‘best friend’s opinion’, to help you make any difficult career, education, financial, professional, health and other life-altering decisions you might need to make.

It’s a pretty straightforward process:

• Sign up for your free account;
• Select a decision type currently more than 40 options);
• Describe and rate the importance of your decision type;
• Choose from three tools: my scores (for deep analysis), my life match (for big decisions), or my points of view (for more perspectives);
• Simon will then make you spend about 10-15 minutes thinking about things, asking you questions and giving you options;
• Simon makes his (your) decision. ‘Coz Simon Says.

Okay, so it’s not actually going to help you with any design problems you might be having but then some of the best ideas do come from silliness.

For some real design inspiration, have a look at Delicious CSS … a web design gallery we like mostly for its name – something so delicious about ‘delicious’ – but also for all the pretty web designs it showcases.

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