This year's Australian Poster Annual, part of the Melbourne Design Festival held in July, was displayed along the banks of the Yarra River, near Federation Square.

The People's Choice Award went to Adelaide-based designer Marie Schultz, from Working Images, for her poster entitled Waiting For A Rainbow, after visitors to the exhibition voted for their favourite entry.

Waiting For A Rainbow was one of forty posters selected from entries recieved from designers across Australia. The brief for the posters was the Melbourne Design Festival's theme: When it rains, it pours.

"The theme of the fesstival called to mind a statistic that one in five people will experience depression at some stage," said Marie Schultz. "This stuck with me as I thought it was an extraordinary figure. From this, I was able to draw a conceptual link with the festival theme."

"I aimed simply to illustrate the inner turmoil that characterises the condition," explained Schultz. "The cloud show the internal mental state (when it rains). The tear is the external manifestation (it pours)."

"The process of creating the image began as a series of drawings exploring the concept, until I felt the message was conveyed in its most pure state in terms of form, colour and subject. The final drawing was scanned and used as a guide to redraw the image in simple shapes. I enjoy creating uncomplicated graphics, and admire the work of modernist graphic designers such as Paul Rand, which communicate with imagination, honesty and function."

The panel of judges who selected posters for the exhibition included highly regarded graphic designers David Lancashire and Max Robinson, both from Melbourne.

Max Robinson noted that there were recurring responses to the theme from the 250 or so entries, such as raining lines of type. "Amongst all of these raining-words solutions one stood out and in my mind was the best poster," he said. "The designer had the nous to use Dylan's lyrics for A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall. A ripper. The People's Choice was beautiful, too, with an emotional appeal reminiscent of Saul Bass or Paul Rand."

"It seems that we are all waiting for a rainbow," said David Lancashire, another judge. "The winner of the People's choice is a quiet and lovely piece, melancholic and simple in this over-complicated world!"

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