LETTERS READ: Mad Men New Orleans-style

The 2021 Season:

ADDA
Slide 32 in the 1961 Art Directors and Designers Association of New Orleans slideshow presentation.

Thanksgiving: Premiering HERE November 25 at 6pm and remaining on air thereafter, letters and ephemera created in 1962 by a local professional association for graphic designers, ADDA.

If you liked the TV show, Mad Men, you’ll love the real thing, New Orleans-style. Art Directors and Designers Association of New Orleans (ADDA) was chartered in 1961. Illustrators, lettering artists, art directors, photographers, commercial artists, and graphic designers banded together and promoted themselves to advertising executives throughout the Gulf South.

Central to this was a promotional slideshow presentation. Digitized in 2008. You can view an animation of it HERE.

If you are curious about the then new-fangled entertainment gizmo, slideshows, watch the Mad Men scene about their origin, HERE.

Join our reader Colin B. Miller, himself a practicing graphic designer, as he continues the programming theme 2021, Doing Business in New Orleans.

Intro and outro-music in the podcast, and the promotional slideshow presentation, are from the original reel-to-reel audio tape recording of the jingle composed and performed in 1961 for the slideshow by Paul Guma. Guma’s music plays an interesting part in the 16th podcast in this series. Airing New Years Eve!

This, Thanksgiving Eve event at 6:00 pm CDT, is the 15th full-length podcast. Don’t fret if you cannot listen at that hour, it remains available thereafter.