Design Showdown: twelve design concepts, one scored competition
Don't pitch one design. Stage a competition: judged by the client's own words.
What was getting in the way.
Design is the riskiest deliverable in an engagement. You're usually shown one direction, defended by whoever made it, and the client can't tell whether they're seeing the best option or just the first one. Feedback rounds turn into taste arguments, and nobody can say what exploring a second direction would have cost.
Context
A live client engagement: the competition ran the same week as the client's kickoff call, narrated in the team's own channel.
How the work runs.
- 01
The brief becomes the law
The client's verbatim design language from kickoff (their vibe words, their hard "never do this" rules) is written down as the scoring rubric before a single pixel exists.
- 02
Field the competitors
Parallel worker lanes each build a complete design concept led by a different creative engine: Lovable's AI builder and Claude Opus agent lanes doing the building, with Recraft (custom vector illustration) and Magnific/Freepik (real stock photography + photo enhancement) leading the art directions: illustration-led, photography-led, hybrid, type-only, plus wildcards.
- 03
Roll controlled variety
Layout and palette variations are assigned per concept and recorded, so the field explores instead of repeating itself.
- 04
Narrate it live
Every concept drops into the team channel with screenshots as it finishes; the humans watch the competition happen.
- 05
Referee against the rubric
An independent scoring pass grades all concepts against the client's own words (not the maker's taste); the top three get a polish round.
- 06
Deliver a decision, not a debate
One bound document: the current-state baseline, every concept, the scorecard, and the polished finalists, with the metered cost of the whole show.
Evidence from the workflow.
Each system has a role.
The arena: scratch workspace; production untouched
Lovable (AI site builder)
The competing creative engines: vector illustration and real stock photography + photo enhancement
Recraft + Magnific/Freepik
The drafting tables
Isolated Claude Opus worker agents
The live broadcast
Team chat
Record of truth: every dollar measured
Cost meters
Why this is Coworker.
Takes assignments and reports back. You hand it work, it prepares and returns a result.
- 01
The production project is never touched: all competition work happens in a throwaway workspace. Client hard constraints (banned palettes, real photos only, banned claims) are pass/fail, not style points. Every concept, score, and dollar is logged; costs come from meters, never estimates. The referee ranks; humans and the client choose.
Impact / Outcomes
12 complete design concepts plus a polished top-3 delivered in a single session as a 19-page scored decision document.
Every concept judged against the client's own kickoff rules: "must not look AI-made" was the client's law, so it was the referee's law.
The entire competition metered to the dollar: about $26 of model spend plus small metered credits on each design platform, a fraction of one traditional design round.
Find where a workflow like this fits.
Start with the systems, work, constraints, and authority already present in your operation.