No layout decision here at all — if none of the options below wins, these four fixes should still ship.

It drops the sentence “we serve clients from around the world with legal issues in BC”, which is a claim the list alone does not make. That sentence would have to move somewhere — the contact page, or the footer.

“Free consultations” is the firm's own line but it applies only to personal injury and estate litigation. It is written that way here; it must not be shortened to a bare “free consultations”.

The split is on the live site and is one of the few places the brand orange appears at full width. Removing it is a brand decision, not only a layout one.

40px taller than the current band, immediately under a hero that already fills the first screen. That is the whole cost; there is nothing else wrong with it.

Uses the character ★ for the stars rather than FontAwesome, because five FA icons at this size crowd inside a hexagon's narrowing sides. If the icon set is ever redrawn as SVG this should follow.

At 1280px this fits with room to spare, but it is the option with the least slack: a seventh office or a longer phone format would break it onto two lines.

16px taller than the current band and it doubles the number of horizontal rules across the page at that point — hero edge, strip seam, strip bottom, then the practice areas.

It puts a hard-edged card over the hero image, so whatever is in the bottom-left of the slide gets covered. The three hero slides do not exist yet — this option constrains how they must be shot.

It removes the band as a colour event entirely. On the live site this strip is one of two places the brand orange appears full-width; here it nearly disappears, which may be exactly right or exactly wrong depending on how loud the hero above it ends up being.

A hexagon is a poor container for a long word: “Campbell River” wraps to two lines inside a 104px cell while the others sit on one. That is visible and it is the price of the shape.

Two of the five are the site's OWN claims and cannot be verified from here: 4.9 and 173 are typed into a block, and “over 160 years” is the practice-areas sub-heading. Two are verified against the database (six location pages, twelve lawyers). Putting them in one row makes them all look equally checked, which is the risk this option carries. It is also the only option on this page with no Google mark in it — a row of numerals has no room for the icon, so the rating is attributed by the words “on Google” alone.

The photograph does not exist. There is no office, harbour or courthouse image in the media library at a usable size — the two candidates in the database have no files on disk. This option is a request for a photograph as much as a layout, and it is drawn as a placeholder for exactly that reason.

The line is a diagram, not a map — the six are evenly spaced left to right and that spacing means nothing geographically. Victoria to Kelowna is a ferry and a day's drive. If it reads as a map it is lying.

White body text on #EF6D3E measures 3.03:1, which fails AA for anything at body size. Everything small here is therefore set at 13.5px SEMI-BOLD or larger, which qualifies as large text at 3:1 — it passes, but only just, and any lighter weight or smaller size in this band breaks it.

It borrows the fa-university glyph that already opens the practice-areas section on this page. That repetition is either a system reading as a system, or the same icon twice — worth checking against the whole page before choosing it.

“Serving clients across British Columbia and beyond” is a compression of the live sentence, not the live sentence. If this one wins, either that line gets approved or the block carries the office address instead — which needs the new address, still unknown.

Honest about what it gives up: nothing here states that Victoria IS the head office. If that fact matters on the homepage — and “Headquartered in Victoria” is the live sentence's first word — this option loses it.

It is blocked on a fact nobody has. The address shown is the same placeholder the footer already carries — “across from the courthouse” with a TBC note — because the exact address after the November move is still unknown. This option cannot ship until that is confirmed.

Ten pixels shorter than today's band, and the only option here that adds no new shape to a page that already carries hexagons in the header, the section badges, the practice tiles and the footer.

It uses the 300-weight uppercase Raleway that the old practice-area headings used and that the new mosaic dropped. Reviving it here is either a continuity with the brand or the return of a style the page just moved away from.

It demotes the rating, which is the one piece of third-party proof on the whole strip. Whether the head office or the 4.9 deserves the loud half is a marketing judgement, not a layout one.

Six links inside one 160-character sentence is a lot of underlining in a small space. E4 below is the same copy with the links kept out of the prose, if this reads as link soup.

34px taller than the band today, directly under a hero that already fills the screen. It buys legibility with the one thing this part of the page has least of.

It says the six place names twice — once in the sentence, once as chips. That repetition is the price of not putting links inside the prose, and it is visible.

Body copy here is #5A544E, not the page's usual #6B6B6B. On white the usual colour would pass, but this band is likely to sit against grey elsewhere on the site, and #5A544E holds up on both — see the ground measurements in the practice-areas round.

Same constraint C1 carries: the card covers the bottom of the hero slide, and the three hero photographs have not been taken yet. It is a note to the photographer as much as a layout.

With the button gone, nothing in this band links to the Contact Our Lawyers parent page — only the six individual office pages. In production the footer would carry that link; in this prototype the footer's Contact is still a placeholder.

Equal-width chips make “Duncan” occupy as much space as “Campbell River”, so the shorter names float in a lot of padding. That is the cost of a tidy right edge.

It demotes the Google rating from the first thing in the band to the last. On the live site that rating sits in the orange block precisely because it is meant to be seen first.

It is a seventh thing on a row of six, and it is the only one that is not a place. If that reads as a stray chip, D3·a is the version that lets it go entirely.

It puts the phone number in the band, the header and the footer — three places on one page. That is either useful repetition for a firm people call, or the same number three times.

Full-height cells make the whole band a set of six click targets, which is good, but it also means the band has no quiet area left — every part of it is now interactive.

It introduces a light ground above and below the ribbon, which means the page gains a colour it did not have between the hero and the practice areas. That ground is #F1EFEB — the same one the practice areas now use — so it reads as the section starting early.

Centred rows of unequal-length words leave ragged edges on both sides. It also has no obvious place for a seventh office — the row would recentre and every chip would move.

The watermark is decoration and is marked aria-hidden, so the rating is still stated once in readable text and announced once, not twice. At 5.5% it is a texture, not a number to read — if it is pushed brighter it starts competing with the chips in front of it.

The header hive is a signature the page uses once, at the top. Repeating it here either extends the system down the page or spends a mark that worked because it was rare. The chips also needed a semi-opaque backing to stay legible over the cells — a sign the texture is close to being too much.

It demotes the only third-party proof on the strip to the size of a caption. If the rating is a selling point — and the live site gives it a full orange block — this option is arguing with that decision, not implementing it.

The dot above Victoria is the only ornament in the whole band. It is 6px, and it is doing the work the “HEAD OFFICE” caption did in every earlier option — which means a reader has to infer it. That is the trade this option makes for its quiet.

“head office” is set in lowercase Open Sans on purpose: the uppercase tracked version reads as a badge, which is the thing this round is removing. It is still real text, so it is still read aloud and still translates.

Nothing here says which one is the head office — only that one is heavier. If that fact has to be on the homepage, M2 is the version that states it without shouting.

The orange rule is the accent for the entire band, which is the point — but it also means the underline pattern is now spoken for. Any hover underline elsewhere in this strip would read as a second head office.

It adds a fourth dark block between the hero and the practice areas, which is now a light section. The page would read dark-dark-light-dark; M1 is the same design without that problem.

Seven markers in one band — six in the chips and one on the label. If that is one too many, the label's marker is the one to drop, not the chips'.

It makes the first chip noticeably wider than the rest — about 200px against 90–130px — so the row is visibly front-heavy. That is the cost of spelling it out at full size.

It is the same fact twice in 60px of vertical space. That is either emphasis or redundancy depending on how much the head office actually matters — and only you and Darren can settle that.

Two costs. The band grows 14px because the label now sits under the chip. And the head-office words are no longer on the marked object — they are next to it, which is a slightly weaker join than v1–v4 make.