For the last few months, we’ve been upgrading the production quality of our work. The results are now finally starting to show.
A few weeks ago we published our first new report, Progress Report: Bottlenecks Events. (Note: That’s a report about events and event design, not a report about our findings on bottlenecks.) This combined the watercolor-future aesthetic from the website with new branding for each of our programs, and of course featured the Bottlenecks events design and logos as well.
Since then, we created a similar format for short essays and briefs. We published our first essay in the new format on Wednesday, What the History of Electricity Can Teach Us About Science, and are now transitioning some of our old quantum biology one-pagers to the new brief format.
You’ll note the new branding for our programs as well, Leverage Metascience and Leverage Bottlenecks. While working on this, I finally came to an idea of what a brand is, namely, something that conveys to people what they should expect it to be like to interact with your organization (or product, etc.).
We have a different but related format for documents that are being circulated privately, which uses the same general color scheme but which is adapted to Google Docs. Here you can see our Introduction to Introspection document, where we’re starting to write up introspection material in a more accessible form.
Most of the work here has been Oliver, with me coming in occasionally and unsticking things or adding a final touch. We’ve been using Figma, which is great. Oliver has been learning to use Midjourney to generate more images in our aesthetic, like the cool “science in crisis” one above on the left. Pretty soon we’ll own our own production stack, meaning, we’ll have in-house all of the capacities we need to produce high-quality content quickly.
So where are we on engagement? We have content, we have the ability to ship, and we’ve made it look professional. The next challenge might be getting people who are already interested in our work to pay attention to it. In other words, making our outputs more captivating. Or maybe it’ll be something else, we’re not sure. Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out and take the next step forward, as is our way.
Until next time,
Geoff
p.s. If you want to learn more about our monthly online introspection meetups or learn more about Leverage’s introspection research, join our Discord, DM us on Twitter, or send us an email!