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Best-of-N Practice

Building creative landing pages by generating many versions and picking one.

We wanted to put together a strong creative landing page for a client quickly, without a large team. The client: a short form video agency — Reels, TikTok, Shorts.

To make that repeatable instead of a one-off, we built our own framework for creative landing pages. This piece is about why it exists and how it works.

Working through many versions

The usual path is to build one design and refine it with edits until it's good. On a creative landing page that's a dead end: you fall for the first idea too early and keep circling it, while the strong move was in a different direction you never even started.

The framework runs on a different principle: producing many different versions in parallel and picking one gets you to a strong result faster than polishing a single version does. That holds even when an agent does the polishing instead of a person. Iterating on one idea is still slower than fanning out across many.

Iterating one version versus best-of-N Left: a single design iterated in a loop. Right: a brief fans out into many parallel versions, then select and refine as two steps. Iterating one versionIdeaDesignRevisionBest-of-NBrief + references0102030405SelectRefine
Iterating a single design, versus fanning a brief out into many versions and then selecting.

The same trick has worked in reasoning tasks for a while. OpenAI's BrowseComp had a system generate many attempts at one task and keep the best one — best-of-N — and that beat a single attempt. That's not proof for design, where a person still judges the aesthetics, but the direction is the same.

How it works

The input is a brief and references. Agents build the versions, in parallel and independently — each one develops its own concept in its own direction. The person's job is to set the directions and choose.

Then come rounds. Weak versions get cut, strong ones move to the next round: a rebrand pass, a new style, a cleanup. Over the course of the project that added up to about twenty-two versions, and four made it to the final round.

Version rounds: 9 concepts to 4 finalists to 1 shipped Landing versions across three selection rounds: nine concepts, cut to four, recolored and expanded, cut again to four finalists, one shipped. 01020304050607080910111213141516171819202122liveRound 1 · 9 concepts, keep 4Round 2 · recolor + new styles, keep 4Round 3 · 4 finalists, one showcaseThe client picked onesurvivedcutshipped
Nine concepts, cut round by round down to four finalists, then one shipped.

The ones that came out bad

A few of the early directions, live. Scroll each one — the flaws only show once it moves.

Type that scrambles on hover — it never settles while you read.
A 3D field of cards in the background that swamps the text.
A dashboard look that fought the brand and the reading.

After about twenty versions, this shipped

The one the client picked, live. Scroll it.

What this gets us

The framework is a repeatable way to build creative landing pages. Many different versions get made at once, and you choose among them — instead of one designer polishing a single idea. The first good version doesn't need to be the final one. What matters is making twenty versions cheaply and comfortably keeping one.

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