How Imprint Works
At Imprint, our mission is to make the world's most important knowledge easy to learn, internalize, and apply to your life. Behind each of our visual lessons is a dedicated team of experts and a meticulous process designed to maximize clarity and make learning stick.
Everything you read on Imprint has been:
Written and reviewed by experts who deeply understand the topic area
Designed and animated by artists who specialize in complex visual communication
Reviewed and revised multiple times for clarity and accuracy
Updated based on user feedback to eliminate points of confusion
Read on to learn more about how we research, write, design, ensure quality, respond to feedback, and choose topics.
How we research and write
Every piece on Imprint begins with thorough research. For book summaries, the writer reads the books and researches the author, their other works, and the topic area in general. For other lessons, we work directly with experts and academics, or we collect information from highly credible sources like major works in the field or courses at prominent universities.
This research culminates in an outline, which focuses on the specific questions we want the piece to answer. Then, the writer creates the script that will be presented in the app, as well as quiz questions and other interactive exercises that will be included to help readers retain what they learn, long after they've finished reading.
Our writing team is led by Olivia Kang, PhD. who previously taught psychology at Harvard. She reviews every script, and works with outside experts to generate novel ways of explaining concepts as clearly as possible.
MEET A FEW MEMBERS OF OUR WRITING TEAM:
Olivia Kang
Director of Learning
PhD, Psychological & Brain Sciences, Dartmouth
Jasmyne Eastmond
Content Editor
MPhil, English Studies, University of Cambridge
John Kaag
Contributing Author
Professor and Chair of Philosophy, UMass Lowell
Jay Van Bavel
Contributing Author
Associate Professor of Psychology & Neural Science, NYU
How we design
The writers and editors collaborate with our creative team to design visuals that will accompany the script. Together, they create sketches of the diagrams, charts, and infographic sequences that will be illustrated, animated, and viewed in the app.
These visuals are never just decoration; we believe they are a core part of an effective learning experience. The best visuals succeed at three goals:
- They help you stay engaged and focused while you read
- They help you quickly understand complex ideas
- They make it easier to remember what you've learned
Imprint's visual lessons are meant to clarify complex concepts, rather than simplify them. Our aim is to educate readers in a short amount of time, without sacrificing depth of understanding. To this aim, our design team includes designers, illustrators, and animators with vast and varied experience communicating complex ideas in media, advertising, and educational settings.
MEET A FEW MEMBERS OF OUR CREATIVE TEAM:
Maren Morstad
Contributing Creative Director
Hyper Island, Google, Dell, NatGeo
Crosby Ignasher
Lead Animator
SCAD, The Wall Street Journal, MasterCard
Alex Cheung
Senior Visual Designer
UVA, Vox
Stephanie Lin
Contributing Illustrator
SVA, Scholar, Psyop
How we ensure clarity and accuracy
For every new release, our writing and visuals go through multiple rounds of copyediting, fact-checking, and revisions, from internal and outside reviewers. The goal during this phase is to eliminate not just errors, but also any points of confusion.
If anyone needs to go back and read a sentence again, or feels, even briefly, like they didn't quite understand a specific statement, we take that as a sign that the piece can be meaningfully improved. We aim to release lessons that you'll understand in full, the first time through. Learning should feel effortless.
How we respond to feedback
The Imprint app makes it extremely easy to submit feedback on our content. You can submit feedback on a specific card, or on a whole chapter. Every time feedback comes in, a notification gets posted to the entire Imprint team.
Some user feedback is about errors or typos, and these are nearly always resolved in a matter of hours. Other times, readers offer suggestions on how to improve our explanations. This feedback from our readers is massively important, and an essential part of the Imprint process. We continue updating our lessons long after they're released, as we continue to respond to user feedback.
How we choose topics
Once we've released our newest content, how do we decide what to work on next? We choose books and topics to cover based on these factors and others:
- Recommendations from our readers
- The New York Times, Amazon, and other bestseller lists
- Major news events and popular topics on social media
- Our own team's interests and areas of expertise