Modish typography or boring recitations of past visual perfection is no guarantee of design quality. This is an error of judgment. Things have value when a creator is con­cerned about exploring contemporary visual attitudes in order that the visual or graphic statement has a personality of its own. Then one can see the cultural influences at work and the visual grammar of a society of which one is a member!

After that, I think the Design Awards competition will never be quite the same again. Many will disagree with Leydin, but this will be a hard act to follow.

The winner of the Andrew Fabinyi Award, ANU Press’ Formal English (designed by Stephen Cole, printed by Griffin Press), is a secondary textbook caried out with classical elegance. A 2½-pica book on the Em Scale. Not quite Leydin’s cup of tea, I would have thought; and indeed this award and some of the other awards and commendations suggest an element of disagreement and trading-off among the judging panel, on which Leydin’s associates were Alan McCulloch and ABR’s John McLaren. It is the familiar committee situation.

Barbara Beckett, with one award (Mead & Beckett/Cassell’s The Great Australian Shellfish Cookbook, printed in Hong Kong) and two commendations (Mead & Beckett/ Rigby’s Richard Beckett Alias Sam Orr Talks About Food, printed in Hong Kong; and Drummond’s A Documentary History of the Australian Labor Movement, printed by Griffin Press), emerges, I think, as the most honoured designer of the year. The contrast between these three books shows versatility and professionalism of a high order. I much admire the Labor history, whose arresting dustjacket and well-planned text pages earn from me what I can only describe as 2½ picas.

A sad feature of the competition is that no awards or commendations were made for primary textbooks. The judges, noting the design effort made in other fields, particularly the children’s section, dryly observe that educational publishers are ‘selling Australian children short’.

Twenty-six out of 194 entries won awards or commendations this year, but the judges’ comments on some of the books they selected are so scathing that I wonder why they bothered. For example, in the field of art books and special editions, Gardens of the Mind (Briarwood Press; designed by Alison Forbes, printed by CS Graphic Reproductions) is dismissed as ‘just a lovely sort of thing’. The judges ‘wonder if this sort of thing is worth doing in the eighties’. Even worse insults are handed to Richmond Hill Press’ The Hobyahs (designed by Alexander Stitt, printed by Norman J. Field), on account of its ‘original preenings’ and ‘serious lapses of taste in the details’.

In the case of The Hobyahs I happen to agree. But the point is; why commend such books at all if that is how you feel about them? I am surprised that awards can be made, and accepted, in an atmosphere of such scorn. Was this another result of the committee situation?