That's awesome

I'm curious about the spacing with the letters on this banner. It's a little smushed for some reason, making it kinda hard to see at a distance. I'm a dork when it comes to layout and typography. Maybe I can help out in some way design-wise

The "flame" letters are text with a flame style applied. They also have a perspective applied to make them appear on the same plane as the bridge. The other text is the Game of Thrones text with some stroke applied to make them stand out. They also have a soft bevel with a gold style applied. The sky was replaced with a "new" sky that looked better. This was made for a hand-out style card and really isn't meant to be made into a banner or anything viewed at a distance. If you really want to take a wag at this, I would be more than willing to send you the elements and see your take on this. I had taken what had already been created and did a little tweaking to it. The original was not in the proper ratio to turn into a landscaped postcard size print, so I cheated a little by adding the additional flame to compensate for the extra space that needed to be filled. I had to do this whole tweak in about an hour as it had to be printed, cut, and sent Fedex overnight to be able to make it to Anthrocon on time for distribution.

Ah, so it was done in an hour. It's odd because when I type the information (Trajan Pro) the letter spacing comes out better.
Also, have you considered doing the trick where you overlay the same text over another layer to make a shadow?
Stroking text was a bit of a no-no in my class, even though it does work sometimes. (Whoops, I could have sworn I clicked Reply >__<)

I just did the "text shadow" trick on a banner I printed this morning for a B-B-Q establishment. I didn't lay out the text spacing on this card. That part was done by someone else, so I didn't mess with it and only applied the style and stroke for definition. The con theme is "Game of Thrones", and they wanted that text style. I suppose I could have spread the text a bit. l I don't know why stroking text would be a no-no, it has its usees. I find stroking text and using outer glow very useful when separating text from a busy background. I also find using drop shadow to look kind of artificial sometimes on backgrounds like sky and where you normally wouldn't have shadow.

I could see where using stroke could become a kind of a one trick pony. Perhaps your teacher is trying to get you to stretch your abilities by using other techniques? I really do use stroke a lot in my work, but not just for text. I make vinyl stickers and stuff, and a stroke is a good way to define the separation around an image for the cut layer on my Mimaki printer.

Ah okay. If anyone needs me to work on something FurryCon related, I could perhaps help. Like I said earlier I'm a big dork for typography and layouts.

I would like to see some samples of your work. I do layout for  fangcon and other cons like TFF, too.

I have just a couple of works on my old Deviant Art page: http://dj-moogle.deviantart.com/