Can't exactly give you advice as such, being a student in a similar situation to yourself, but my plan at the moment is to gain experience in the industry first. I've been freelancing now for a while and that's been a lot more useful than any university project if I'm honest.

University tends to set you projects that you probably wouldn't want included in a professional portfolio.. at least I don't as the outcomes are often light hearted and not particularly industry focused. Infact they seem to try to teach us how to be an incredibly successful designer, working for the big names in design. The reality is that only a handful of people get that opportunity, the rest of us will have to do things like branding for smaller companies etc. first!

What I like about the idea of going straight into freelancing is that I'm my own boss. I'm terrorfied of being the tea and coffee girl, or just getting to lay out other people's designs in Indesign (hurray!), but at the end of the day, I know I'm not really experienced enough yet to launch a freelance career. Saying that, I've just designed and laid out an entire publication. It was hard, I had very little printing knowledge etc. but been a really good learning experience... but the plan at the moment is to gain some years experience in industry until I either end up being in charge of something (even if it's small!) or getting sick of being a lapdog and leave it all in favour of freelance, but all the while keeping up a freelance site and doing bits and pieces in my free time. I might even drag some uni mates into doing the same and lump us under one company!

So in conclusion - if you have no industry experience, get some. You don't know if you'll hate it 'til you try, and any experience is good experience. Mind you, if your band take off you might not need to 😛 (who is your band btw? :D)

Lyss

For some reason I didn't think about looking for the company names themselves, thanks!

I found a couple of sites that supply a number of companies paper samples, so now I'll try being a bit more specific.

(and yes, I'm after swatches.. it's really just to get a feel and idea of the paper, not to use)

I was just wondering if anyone knows any good places to get some paper samples?

I've done the usual google search of 'paper samples' and tried the first few hits and will see if they get back to me.

You see, I've been to a few printers where I live and they seem to look at me confused as if paper samples is a curious thing to ask for, only one was remotely helpful and suggested contacting paper merchants directly, but I've not had much luck.

Previously when I've been doing freelance work I've not needed to sort out the printing side of things, so this is a bit new to me, but I'm very keen to build up samples I could show clients etc.