I stumbled upon Padmapper a few months ago just in time for my fiance to receive her rent renewal notice, accompanied with an 8% bump. BOOOO!

Padmapper is mostly a Craigslist and Google Maps mashup, with a few other online services added in for good measure. Every apartment hunter I’ve introduced Padmapper to has been unreasonably grateful. All I did was send a link! Enjoy.

Dieter Rams is one of the most well known and successful industrial designers, known for his brilliant work at Braun for over 30 years. Rams followed the approach “weniger, aber besser” which translates to “less, but better”. To give you a deeper understanding of that philosophy, Rams is quoted as saying that Jonathan Ive and the team at Apple are the only company today that still follow what he believes are the core values of design.

At the age of 78, Rams says he doesn’t own a computer, but his Ten Principles for Good Design certainly apply a great framework for web design:

Gone are the days of geocities websites. Thank God. Innovative web design evolves with and is developed with the latest in web technologies, such as semantic HTML, CSS3, and JavaScript libraries, with an eye kept on future technologies.

A good website design serves as a purposeful portal. Whether it is a social portal or an information portal, good web design focuses on the usefulness of a site to an end user, while excluding any elements that may detract from the user experience.

A site can be tremendously useful, but to keep traffic coming back, it needs “the look”. Even the extreme simplicity of a site like craigslist holds in itself an aesthetic beauty.

Good web design explains itself. Easy to use navigation and straight forward user interfaces are at the core of any good design.

Good web design is, for lack of a better word, moderate. Hot pink, 144pt article font certainly won’t keep your visitors coming back.

Hidden pay-per-click links and multi-page articles to increase pageview counts do nothing for the user, and certainly have no place in a good web design. A good web design does not manipulate users for the gain of the site’s owners.

Good web design is timeless. A trendy design may bring a repeat customer back sooner for a web designer, but a long lasting design focuses not on fashion, but builds and helps carry on the legacy of a brand.

Web designers and design recruiters love to talk up “pixel-perfect design”, but there is some enduring truth to these industry buzzwords. Sharing a common canvas with comparable work from other artists, the little things matter big in web design. The right color for a checkout button or the proper use of white-space can turn a great site in to a horrible site.

The web is its own eco-system. From cutting down on bandwidth use, to preventing visual pollution, a good web design is web environment friendly. Clean code, cross-browser compatibility, and minimal resource requirements. That’s green web design.

That 3 minute animated-Flash splash page to your website might be pretty cool the first time, but does it add to the experience of your site’s users? “Weniger, aber besser”. Less, but better. Words to live by.

“If you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, it’s too large.”

-Jeff Bezos. Amazon.com

Via StartupQuote

At a recent HTML5 meetup, Microsoft Evangelist Giorgio Sardo held a vigil for Internet Exploder 6. IE6, long the bane of web designers everywhere is getting flipped upside down in the form of IE9. Turns out IE9 is kicking some major tail, specifically that of my Windows browser of choice, Chrome.

Sardo tells us that the IE team is working hard on hardware acceleration of web features. With today’s ever increasing computing specs, hardware acceleration certainly makes sense. For the daring among us, you can get the IE9 Developer Preview now.

Not to be left behind, the folks at Mozilla are really thinking through UX/UI for their next release of Firefox. Alex Faaborg walks us through the process of designing tabs in Firefox 4.

Via @besologic

As WordPress users already know by the trusty “please update now” link at the top of their admin dashboards, late last week, the WordPress team released WP 3.0. While the name suggests it’s the 3rd version of WordPress, WP 3.0 is actually the 13th version of WordPress.

There are a couple of key things to note about the latest major revision…

• WordPress Multisite – WP and WPMU have merged to allow multiple sites to be managed from just one installation of Wordpress. (‘Bout time you start that blog network you’ve been meaning to start.)

• Twenty Ten – WP 3.0 features a brand new default theme which shows off many of the new features. In fact, if you have installed the new version you may have found the original “default” theme strangely absent. If you’re building a theme, make sure you have all the types of theme pages covered.

• Selectable Username – WP 3.0 prompts you to enter a username and password on installation, whereas before you would be defaulted to the user: admin and an impossible to remember default password. This is a good chance to remind you to keep your passwords strong as you setup WP 3.0. The original created passwords were pretty complex, and thus secure. 1Password is a great tool to generate secure passwords and keep them all organized without having to remember them.

• “Blog” to “Site” – the options panel has changed the word “blog” in the general settings to the word “site”, indicating the WordPress team’s desire to push WP as more than just a blogging tool, but a bonafide CMS.

The full list of changes can be found in the WordPress Codex. In just 5 or so years, WordPress has attracted an 8-digit user base, and a micro-economy of designers and developers. Instead of getting straight to work on WP 3.1, as the WordPress team has done in the past, they’re moving to work on things for the WordPress community. As a designer, I’d say that’s a great decision and I’m looking forward to the forthcoming WP ecosystem updates.

Thanks to all the contributors to WordPress 3.0 and their excellent work!