Graphic students and lazy design method

Today, just before I get back from my whole week holiday, I noticed 2 banner & bunting order that been sitting on my desk. Its due yesterday (lol). I called my partner and he said that its been reschedule for delivery early next week. I was concerned earlier because the design that costumer provided still isn't reviewed.

The customer was a couple of art & design students at local U who came to the office just before the holiday. . It seems that they're doing it for paper project or something. They already show me the design before. At a glance, I noticed that the design was beautifully rendered in my Illustrator 9. The file was originally created using Illustrator 10. Luckily the AI10 import into AI9 aren't that problematic compared to importing a CS version. I couldn't resist asking question about the Adobe Illustrator as the industry standard and their implementation in various subject in Art & Design courses, like why are they still using AI 10 and not CS for example.. or do they (Adobe) really have a "constrain proportion" features when transforming objects.

Afterall, not many customer I've dealing with, use Illustrator. Most of them brought me design in MSword, Print Artist, Photoshop and even sometimes.. MSpaint BMP (in a diskette).

It was fun, even I learned a trick or two. ..Until I opened their design (2 of them). Its supposed to be ad banner for cappucino cafe or something. Fine.. the design was expected from a graphic / A&D students. Nice styling and glamorous font design. But when I tried to resize the illustration to match their desired final output, the design was stretched. Selecting all the elements again reveal that those students actually using a large jpeg picture, uncropped, masked using clipping mask. In a simple word, they're using a lazy method to make the design look good and convincing on computer screen but really bad for printer output.

Don't get me wrong. I don't really mind bad design or inappropriate filetype brought by customer. Its my job to fix them and make it look good both on screen and for final printing. But a bad & lazy design coming from a graphic / Art & Design students? man..

It took me 10 minute to masking / clip the picture properly and import them using CorelDraw 12 to clean the problem on the fly. Problem solved (amazing but true. Why Corel you ask? I don't really understand the reason, but most SME printer company seems to prefer Corel over Adobe, at least here in Malaysia)

what's really bugging me is why this thing happens in the first place. Who's fault is it? The student, the lecturer, or the educational system itself? This is not the first time something like this happened. Once I bump into a 2nd year graphic student who tried to color a scanned artwork in photoshop. Over and over only to find that every color that he picked ended up as greys when painted. Did he even understand the how rgb/greyscale color working from the start? Not to mentioned countless of student sending me colorful Powerpoint design in A4 size and ask me to print them as 10' x 3' banner.

Today's educational system does create a creative society, but do they really made people more savvy?