Semester 5.2

Another semester over and it turned out great. This time, instead of stressing out myself, my family, and my co-workers by trying to burn the midnight oil I felt impressed to request 3 days off from my day-time work assignment specifically to work on finals. It worked out perfectly; I was able to get all my work done without having to worry about jeapordizing my day work assignment. Being able to work over the weekend helped, too, and I took full advantage of it.
There was plenty that needed to be done; I even accepted the assistance of my lovely wife to help with the final box for my Packaging Design class. I had the idea of making a display box from a DVD set that would fold out but I didn't understand the mechanics of it. We had to buy a tacklebox to understand the fundamentals. It turned out well enough and got a great reaction from the crowds that saw it.

Once again our instructor brought in some local business people to critique our work. This time it turned out to mostly positive. The week before the last day of class our instructor really urged me to turn things down; once again stressing that I had too much on. I had already printed out most of the assignment and told him I couldn't apply it all in time.
In the end, I believed he was right and bit the bullet to fix and reprint everything I had already completed. For my troubles I got a lot of the same feedback from the critiquers (consistancy is a good thing) and most of it was positive.
My instructor and the local business people were mostly impressed with my soap box design/concept. I redid the assignment with the changes suggested and it turned out to be a beautfiul little piece. I'm intending to use it in my portfolio.
Because I took my instructor's advice he and I have actually become better associates. He told me on his way out the door that I had come "leaps and bounds" from when I first started and that made me feel good. People like it when others take their advice. As the saying goes, "Good advice is to take it." It made me feel really good to hear that from him, especially after all of the bad reviews I've gotten from his classes in the past.

It turned out that the web design class was just an intro-enough to make us 'dangerous', as our instructor put it, but not enough to help us to be helpful.
For the time being I believe I'll stick to Blogger - it did give some great layout design hints before I began the coding process.