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This week's installment of Deke's Techniques shows how to create type that looks just like the logo for The Hobbit movie poster. Which is an insanely great effect.

As many of you know, Peter Jackson and company decided to divide The Hobbit---a 310-page book---into three movies. At the beginning of my video (the one above), I joke that the first movie (An Unexpected Journey) covers the first 36 pages of the book. Today, I took my boys to see the movie. And, as it turns out, I wasn't joking!

I timed it: The movie doesn't get to the beginning of the book, The Hobbit, until 37 minutes in! And it takes another 15 minutes (or thereabout, didn't time it) to cover the first page of the damn thing. After that, we discover that Thorin (the lead dwarf) hates elves, a wizard named Radagast the Brown rides on a sleigh pulled by bunnies, Saruman has something to do with this story, Cate Blanchett and Ian McKellen can speak to each other telekinetically, Bilbo (with no prior knowledge of swordsmanship) slays orcs and goblins (who attack ad nauseum and at various sizes), there are Stone Giants (why?), and Bilbo is tempted to kill Golum but he manages to trick a trio of trolls instead. None of which happens in the book! The movie is mildly entertaining (I got up and ordered popcorn at one point b/c I was so bored, after which I fell asleep twice), but it has Precious little to do with The Hobbit.

So here's my advice: Wait for the Blu-ray. And if you're making a movie based on a popular children's novel, diverge from it as much as possible and milk it for all you're worth.

Meanwhile, if you want to make your type look like The Hobbit movie logo (which is awesomely cool!), watch my video. Here's the official description from lynda.com: Read more » 

In this week's free Deke's Techniques video, Deke McClelland gets in the Hanukkah spirit and creates this festive, jaunty Star of David in Adobe Illustrator. Starting with the simple circle on the left (below), Deke cuts, twists, warps, and strokes it into the complex shape on the right:

Honestly, how awesome is that? Read more » 

After 19 days on the road, sleeping in a total of 11 bedrooms---some safely ensconced within swanky hotels, others boorishly meandering among ordinary pit stops---I have just this moment returned to the sweet embrace of my hometown (and townhome in) Boulder, Colorado.

Which means it's time for me to get serious and shift my focus from enjoying the holidays to preparing for them. Hence this week's movie, "The Panic Button," as best summed up by the official description prepared so eloquently by lynda.com:

In this week's free Deke's Techniques, Deke takes the beautifully glowing jewel that he created last week and turns it into a beautifully glowing Panic button. Because this time of year, if you're going to freak out, you want to (at the very least) do so in a pretty and decorative way.

Deke begins this project where we left off last week, with the glowing cabochon that he created out of pure Photoshop pixels, vectors, and effects. Because few people wear Panic buttons around their necks---although, perhaps, that would be handy---the first step is to turn off the Gold Necklace layer. The result is that last week's glimmering jewel becomes a standalone button:

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Today, three things: First, I'm newly back from Ireland, which was nothing short of astonishingly crazy awesome. Second, as I write this, we have exactly 50,000 members of dekeOnline. (I know, what are the chances of such a round number? But there it is on the big Member-O-Meter.) And third, I greet you this Tuesday as I do every Tuesday with a new episode of Deke's Techniques.

What is it about? I'd love to tell you, but I wasted my introductory paragraph on that other garbage. But just so you're not left hanging, here's the official description from my video publisher, lynda.com:

This week's free episode of Deke's Techniques documents one of those delightful projects in which Deke manages to create something precious, in this case a rounded shimmering jewel, completely from scratch inside Photoshop. He starts with nothing more than the plain black ellipse you see on the left (below) and builds the glowing amber cabochon on the right using little more than a collection of layer effects, not to mention a suitable background of marble and a gold chain.

Read more »