Alison Forbes


Alison Forbes is an Australian book designer and illustrator. Over a period of five decades she has worked as Australia's "first full-time independent book designer", and produced many prize-winning book designs of Australian titles, beginning with Alan Marshall's I Can Jump Puddles.

Career

Forbes was born in Melbourne in 1933 and attended Camberwell Grammar School.
She studied design at the Melbourne Technical College. After graduation in 1953 she worked at the Melbourne Herald while undertaking freelance illustration and book design in her free hours. At the age of 23 she was appointed as the first staff designer at the Melbourne University Press.
In 1963 she travelled to London and during the next three years and in order to gain book trade experience, she worked for two British publishers, the Associated Book Publishers and the smaller Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd.
Returning to Australia in 1967, she worked for five decades as a full-time book designer, until her retirement from full time design in "about 2005". Over the years she worked alongside such major figures in the Australian publishing world as Frank Eyre, Andrew Fabinyi, Max Harris, Gwyn James, Lloyd O’Neil, Sam Ure Smith and Ken Wilder.
She has devoted herself to book design work, her focus being to create an "enduring body of work unique in its quality, and quantity" and was not tempted by the higher financial rewards on offer in "commercial graphic design or advertising" with the inevitable compromises demanded in those fields. The poet and critic Max Harris, who had worked with her on several projects, stated: "The meticulous Alison Forbes hasn’t lost her advanced and distinctive sense of the highest design principles".

Awards