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. 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 (
Oxford University Press, Melbourne),
Andrew Fabinyi (
F. W. Cheshire),
Max Harris (
Sun Books), Gwyn James (
Melbourne University Press),
Lloyd O’Neil, Sam Ure Smith (
Sydney Ure Smith) and Ken Wilder (
William Collins, Melbourne). 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==