Got It!

After a lot of tinkering, I like this layout, and it's the one I will sew together:

It's a little bit jumpy, it has a lot of verve and liveliness, and it doesn't depend on symmetry. It needs another row, but that won't be a problem.

This was okay, but it was kinda boring.

This wasn't bad, but here are twenty blocks arranged four columns by five rows. This layout depends on symmetry for its success. The quilt needed to be five blocks by six, which meant the pattern would have 2-1/2 half repeats, instead of 3. That bothered me. There are four columns here, so it looks good, but five would look a bit weird.

This arrangement is more or less a combination of the previous two, but again, there are five rows and the design looks off balanced and incomplete.  Why not make the quilt bigger? Because this is going to a kid who's going off to college. He doesn't need a queen sized quilt at 18.

When I decided to see what would happen if I let the light/dark centers idea go to hell, I knew I had it as soon as I arranged the first four blocks.

I wanted a quilt that was lively and energetic. Orange and purple have a lot of energy on their own, and I wanted to keep that going, not tone it down, as I felt some of the other arrangements did. I'm happy with this, and excited again.