Why I never hired old people for the Bank One brochures in the mid-90s

When the Western Region of Bank One decided that they wanted to update their brochures in the mid-1990s, the job went to the department where I worked, in Arizona. And I was assigned the task of going through the stock photo books and finding images to use on the covers that showed diversity (which was still fairly new in those days). And, as you'd expect, back then the stock photos were anything but diverse, in terms of race and gender, and certainly age, or body type. Attitudes had been changing since I had been a kid, in the '60s and '70s, but businesses were slow to pick up on it, especially in their advertising.

And after spending endless hours finding nothing, I approached my boss with the idea of letting me hire a photographer, and use my co-workers as models. The price would be about the same as licensing a stock photo, and the models would only get a dollar (which was the minimum amount to make them sign off permission to use them in the photos). To my surprise, she agreed, and I went and had the most fun that I've ever had as a graphic designer.

And while I've spent many years patting myself on the back for my progressive attitude, showing things like a business that was owned by a woman (imagine that!), or couples that weren't just Anglo-Saxon, I realized today that I completely missed a category that I've now found myself in - old.

Don't get me wrong, our department did collateral (which is what we called newsletters, etc.) that were aimed for the "55 and better" crowd - and yes, that's how we phrased it: "55 and better". But it was only when material was intended for the Sun City crowd, with larger type, that sort of thing. And apparently it never even occurred to me to include older people in my suggestions for the brochure covers.

I suggested a lot of things that were immediately rejected, such as interracial couples, and I just had to accept that attitudes change slowly. The brochures had to appeal to Bank One customers in Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and Texas, so many things weren't even mentioned. I had just moved from California and I'd seen a lot of diversity in Los Angeles, but I had to learn that the rest of the country wasn't Los Angeles.

The lesson here for me is that I never even considered old people. And while I wandered around the building downtown asking people if they'd like to model for a brochure, I never, ever, approached anyone above the age of 40. Since I'm 63 now, it's hard to imagine that over 40 was old, and 50 was just about impossible, but that's how I felt in my thirties.

Nowadays I enjoying seeing the ads on Pinterest that are doing things that I wasn't allowed to do, and sometimes hadn't even thought of. I see a lot of diversity, which I've always considered appropriate in advertising, the same way that it's appropriate all over the world.

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