One of the many projects in my Concepts and Layout class was to create a poster for the HSU Theatre production of "The Servant of Two Masters".  The entire class worked on their ideas for the poster for about 2 months before finally turning in a matted piece as our final project.  Throughout those 2 months the theatre managers would come to our class and give their opinions on each piece.  One person's piece stood out among the rest and the theater managers actually did a double take on his piece.  The funniest thing was this person hadn't shown up to class that often, and up until that point most of his work looked rushed and unfinished.  When they came to critique my piece they liked it but no one did a double take on it like they did on Jason's piece.  The one thing I had going for my piece was I purposely created the poster with two colors (red and black, the paper color is white so no ink is needed) while Jason's piece was in four colors (by mixing four colors you can basically create any color imaginable). When it comes to printing, four colors costs exponentially more than printing with just two colors.  In terms of design, our posters were direct opposites, his was crazy and lively (he basically used every filter and texture Illustrator had to offer) while mine was simplistic and to the point.  In the end the HSU Theatre managers chose my piece probably due to the cheaper printing cost, a sad fact that is common in the graphic design industry. My next ask was to edit the poster is it could be printed easily, a feat which turned out to be much harder than I thought.  I had only saved a Photoshop file of the poster while my Illustrator file was erased between the semesters.  In order to properly edit the poster without causing pixelization I would need the Illustrator file and converting the Photoshop file to an Illustrator file would not work...  I ended up opening the jpg picture in Illustrator and physically redrawing the ENTIRE piece by manually tracing every line with the pen tool.  I then had to find the exact font and size of the text and match the kerning and spacing exactly to that used previously by using the guess and check method.  After six hours of work I had an Illustrator file that matched the original file almost perfectly. A few hours later the picture was in 3 layers, one of each color and the white background, and ready to be sent off to the printer the next day.   Finally, I created a different version of the picture so it would fit on a shirt used by the actors which took 10 minutes since I had already gone to the trouble of creating an Illustrator file to work from.  When all was said and done I spent around 20 hours working on the poster over 3 months, which made the check I received all the more worth it.
Interesting side-fact: Even though my poster won I still received a B in the class, which makes me wonder what I would have to do to earn an A...