The Case Photos Do the Selling

// The brief

An alumni-recruitment email for a four-day CE course taught by Didier Dietschi, one of the clinicians who helped define modern adhesive dentistry. The audience already knows IDEA and already knows Didier, so the job wasn't introducing anything, it was reminding a warm list why this specific cohort, capped at 16 seats, was worth reserving before it filled.

// The image problem

I was handed a batch of real photos, unsorted and uncaptioned: a patient's failing amalgam restoration, several stages of an indirect restoration case at different points in treatment, a chairside teaching moment, and a group shot of the current cohort. None of it was styled for marketing. Some of it wasn't usable at all.

• Before: the amalgam photo, shot in the patient's mouth with natural gum tissue, no dam. It reads instantly as "the problem" without any caption doing the work.
• After: of the finished-restoration photos available, only one showed fully polished, color-matched results, so that's the one that earned the "after" slot. A rubber-dam try-in shot from earlier in treatment looked unfinished to anyone outside the case and was left out entirely, along with a lab-model shot that, while clean, broke the in-mouth before/after logic by switching context.
• Proof of format: the chairside teaching photo and the cohort group shot did double duty, showing this is genuinely small-group and hands-on, not a lecture hall with a course number.

// The design

Built in inline-safe HTML and CSS to survive real email clients, not just a browser preview. IDEA's existing maroon (#8b1a2b) and gold (#e3a83b) system carries the banner and the pricing block; everything else drops onto black so the case photography, the only full-color imagery in the email, is the thing your eye lands on. Two identical CTA buttons bracket the case study and the proof section so the ask is never more than one scroll away.

// Why it's here

This wasn't a from-scratch brand build, it was taking someone else's raw material, real clinical photos with no art direction behind them, and making editorial judgment calls about which four told the story and which two didn't. That's a different muscle than concepting a campaign, and it's the one that gets used every time a client hands over a folder of unsorted assets and needs something sendable by Friday.