Frustration over last week's assignment

OK So I'm just fuming over this so I need to let it out.

We presented our first part of the typeface brief assignments on Tuesday last week. I had painstakingly worked on that stupid thing and deleted it about 6 times before finally landing on something that I kind of liked. I showed it to a friend and he said it was boring- that it needed more diversity in the fonts. I showed it to another friend and she said she liked it a lot and just to bold one or two more words.

So I did that thinking that the message got across and would be easily recognizable as a literary reading quote. The bolded words would easily get the message across what the quote was talking about... and the larger words would give more subtext to the bolded words and so on and so forth.

I get to class and someone says that it's too busy- they don't know what to focus on and they don't understand what purpose the bolded words had.

*Facedesk*

I don't understand where my happy middle is. If I bold the words, people say they don't understand what they're supposed to be looking at, but if I don't, people say they don't understand what they're supposed to be looking at because it's so bland.

I was so frustrated with this thing last week that I was ready to start crying in anger at the Mac I was sitting in front of in the middle of the library.

We have to have an updated draft of this project by Thursday... I don't know how to change it other than starting over because I hate this thing so much and no one else can decide if they like it. I actually like it the way it is, but if it's not going to be accepted and received by everyone else the way I intend it to be, how can it be a good design?