SmashingMagazine Meetup#4 with Denise Jacobs and Francis Chouquet

Another Meetup, another city, another fabulous speaker! For our January event we're very pleased to welcome Denise R. Jacobs (http://twitter.com/#!/denisejacobs) from Florida. Denise is an Creativity Evangelist, Web Design Trainer and Author of The CSS Detective Guide (http://cssdetectiveguide.com/), and is a co-author for InterAct with Web Standards: A Holistic Approach to Web Design (http://interactwithwebstandards.com/). Denise will be joined by Francis Chouquet (https://twitter.com/#!/Fran6), web designer and WordPress Expert from Switzerland who will discuss the question of the year with us: is CSS3 going to make Photoshop obsolete?

This time we'll visit the fabulous city of Basel, Switzerland - and we have been welcomed with open arms!

• The folks from webilea (http://www.webilea.ch/) are going to combine their monthly meeting with ours

• Thanks to Magnolia CMS (http://www.magnolia-cms.com/), the restaurant «zur Mägd» (http://www.zurmaegd.ch/index.html) is going to open its doors just for us

and

• Magnolia CMS (http://www.magnolia-cms.com/) and i-net Basel (http://www.inet-basel.ch/) are going to sponsor food and drinks!

SmashingMagazine wants to thank them and everyone else who has offered all the great and generous support!

Schedule for the event:

5pm: doors open, drinks

6pm: Denise Jacobs

http://photos2.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/3/1/d/0/event_82392752.jpegDenise is going to run a presentation on "The Art of Disciplined Creativity" for us:

As web industry professionals, we rarely experience a shortage of projects that necessitate our creativity. Everyone has moments of being on fire with creativity, but often the time of being in the state of creative flow is all too short. Additionally, sometimes we get stuck: we lack inspiration, our creative confidence wanes, and the generation of ideas comes to a standstill. Much like elite athletes, creatives need to exercise discipline to be able to get into the "zone" at at will and produce consistently great results. Let's explore ideas and practices for regularly gathering sources of inspiration, eliminating blocks to more easily access creative states, prolong them, and leverage their power to develop and execute great work.

6.45pm: FAQ

7pm: break - drinks and food

7.15pm Francis Chouquet

http://photos1.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/e/4/5/4/event_88318452.jpegFrancis will examine the current positioning of web designers and developers to be able to answer some of the pressing questions about the future of web design: CSS3 or Photoshop?

Even If Photoshop was created for photo editing, it has always been the preferred tool for web designers. Yet the CSS3 arrival last year might have changed this. Indeed, CSS3's great success is partially due to its many "design related" functions. Since last year, we noticed that more people dare to design directly in the browser instead of using Photoshop.

This raises important questions for the future of web design: is the web designer supposed to code ? With CSS3, it seems impossible to stay away from it. But on the other hand, will the front end developper accept to give away this part of his job or will developpers now start to design as well?

7.45pm FAQ

8pm drinks and food, networking

9.30pm goodbye

Looking forward seeing you all!

In the meantime, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/the-smashing-newsletter/) and stop by at our Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/68892449@N05/) and Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/smashingmagazine/) account.