Alison Forbes

Alison Forbes (1933– ) 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 (1955). Career Forbes was born in Melbourne in 1933 and attended Camberwell Grammar School. She studied design at the Melbourne Technical College (now Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology). 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 (a conglomerate of Methuen, Eyre & Spottiswoode, and others) and the smaller Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd.