I have always told my children that if you want to learn from your father’s mistakes, take good care of your teeth. That’s why I was in the offices of Alan Dechter, DDS, to begin the process of installing an implant to replace a tooth extracted due to my own foolish negligence.
Alan is my oldest friend. We grew up a few houses apart from each other and played nerdy games together as kids. I always loved to draw and tell stories, and Alan liked to build models and focus on the details to get things just right. So, it is no wonder that I started a design studio, and he built a dental practice.
So, at his office, I had 3D X-rays taken. I watched a large monitor form images of my teeth in four modes, profile, panorama, a three-quarters full-skull, and a close-up of the area where the implant would be. When Alan examined the images, he could zoom in, rotate around areas in three axes, and even move through tissue layer-by-layer. A faint shadow of where my molar had been showing the bone was growing back.
Next, he moved a small camera over my teeth and gums that produced a remarkably realistic 3D photographic image of my teeth. Instead of making an impression in gel, then sending out the result to have a clay model cast for reference, this computer-aided tech created a virtual much more detailed impression than any casting. Together with the 3D X-rays, the two sets of images would allow a vendor to create custom implant screws, bases, and teeth and a template used as an insertion guide. Dentistry, which had once seemed to me to be little changed since the nineteenth century (and inspired my fear of dentists), had taken on the trappings of futuristic sci-fi.
As he was manipulating the image, Alan said something that struck a chord. Demonstrating how he could take the image and manipulate it, perhaps building a virtual crown for a tooth if needed, and then send it to his 3D printer that would mill a porcelain tooth in a half-hour, he said, “I can be so much more creative when I can do these things myself.”
That’s when I realized how his dental practice and my design studio had both been revolutionized by digital imaging. In the 40 years since we both started our businesses, it literally transformed how we worked, letting us use our traditional skills more creatively.
At AURAS, we can produce beautiful typography, manipulate images for better color or fanciful collages or filters, produce complex page layouts with infinite variations of colors, textures, and effects. Forty years ago, all of these required outside vendors with a much more limited set of tools and a lot more money, outside vendors, and effort to produce—if one could do it at all. Now, it could all be accomplished at your own desk—provided you had the skills.
As my friend said as we left for lunch, “I feel I can do almost anything, but I’m not sure I can stand learning how to use another piece of software.”
