.claims — layout options

Six ways to draw the thirteen injury claims. Every option carries the real thirteen, their real URLs, and the photograph the live claim page itself uses for each — all executed out of gen_injuries_index.py, so nothing here can drift from injuries-index.html.

Thirteen is the constraint, and only one option solves it. Thirteen is prime, so every plain grid leaves a ragged last row: four across leaves a lone tile on row four, five leaves a row of three, six leaves a lone tile on row three. C3 is the only layout on this sheet where thirteen fits exactly — and not by styling: a 4-column grid is 16 cells over four rows, a 2×2 lead takes four, and the remaining twelve hold exactly the other twelve claims.
optionheight at 1280tilelast row
C1 — grid, caption under671px230×173three of five
C2 — caption on the image722px230×230three of five
C6 — hexagon tiles945px230×266three of five
C5 — a row per group1018px193 / 302 / 411each row is full
C3 — mosaic, one leading1088px296×220, lead 624×472no hole at all
C4 — rows with thumbnails1314px96×72one column, no ragged row
Measured in headless Chrome at 1440, not estimated — and the first draft of this table was wrong in two places, which is why it is measured: C2 looked like the short one because it has no caption band, and C3 looked like the tall one because its lead tile is the biggest thing on the sheet. Neither is true.
Two things are settled and identical in all six, so the comparison is about layout. Tone: eleven of the thirteen photographs are already black and white on the live site — measured as mean per-pixel chroma, not read off filenames like blackandwhitemiata — so all thirteen are filtered to match rather than the cyclist and the pedestrian reading as mistakes. Colour: names brown 10.87:1, hover #A94A29 5.68:1. Brand orange is 3.03:1 and carries no word anywhere here; it is a rule under a hovered tile and nothing else.
The two portrait photographs are anchored, not centred. The motorcycle source is a rider's-eye view with the machine in the lower half — centred, the tile showed an empty road and no motorcycle — and the dog's open jaw centres slightly high. Every option inherits both anchors, so no option is being judged on a crop the others do not have.
Page weight, the same in five of six. The tiles display at 230px and the media library's nearest derivative is 768px — 3.3× what is needed, 2,427 KB for thirteen images. The 300px set is 379 KB but soft on a retina screen, and the originals are 6,942 KB (Pedestrian's alone is 5472×3648 and 3.78 MB). The size that is actually right, ~461px, does not exist: registering a 460px image size in WordPress is the fix, and it is a setting rather than a layout decision. C4 is the exception — at 96×72 the 300px set is already more than enough, so that option could ship at a tenth of the weight today.
C1grid, caption underheight 671px

The page as it stands. Five across on the team page's bench module — 230.4px cell, 32px gutter — so people and claims are drawn by one card rather than two that nearly match. Thirteen leaves a row of three, which reads as a row rather than an orphan. The caption band is what makes it 671px; every other grid option here spends that space differently.

C2grid, caption on the imageheight 722px

The name moves onto the photograph, so there is no caption band — and that room goes straight back into the picture, which grows from 173 to 230px tall, a third bigger. It does not make the section shorter: 722 against C1's 671, because 57px of extra picture on three rows costs more than three caption bands saved. The scrim is the contrast, not decoration: white on rgba(0,0,0,.86) measures 8.8:1 over a mid photograph and 6.0:1 over the brightest of the thirteen. A lighter scrim would fail on the bright tiles only — the worst kind of failure, because it looks right on whichever ones you happen to check. Cost: a name over a picture is always harder to scan than a name on white.

C3mosaic, one claim leadingheight 1088px

The only option here where thirteen fits with no hole, and it is arithmetic: a 4-column grid is 16 cells over four rows, a 2×2 lead takes four, and the remaining twelve cells hold exactly the other twelve claims. It also answers a question the flat grid cannot: the thirteen are not peers — car accidents is the claim most people arrive for — and the lead tile is 624×472, the only place on the page a photograph is big enough to be a photograph. Cost: 1088px, and which claim leads is the firm's call, not a layout's.

C4rows with thumbnailsheight 1314px

The photograph becomes a 96×72 thumbnail and the name becomes the row. The most scannable by far — thirteen names in one column, read top to bottom in one pass, with sentence-case names at 17px instead of thirteen shouted capitals. It is also the tallest of the six at 1314 — thirteen rows is thirteen rows. Cost: it spends the pictures. At 96px a photograph is an identifier, not an image, and four of these thirteen (the dog's jaw, the seatbelt, the crosswalk) are close crops that stop reading at that size.

C5a row per groupheight 1018px

Each group fills the full 1280, so the tile size IS the group size — six across at 193px, four at 302, three at 411. The grouping becomes legible without a single label having to explain it. That is also the cost: Road Accidents ends up with the smallest tiles because it has the most claims, which is exactly backwards if importance is what the size is saying. And the grouping is home_v1's proposal, not the firm's — this is the option that breaks if the taxonomy changes.

C6hexagon tilesheight 945px

The brand's shape carrying the photographs, on ratio: 230.4 / 0.8660254 = 266.03. The most unmistakably League-and-Williams of the six. Cost is in the shape itself — a hexagon mask cuts four corners off every photograph, and none of these thirteen was framed for it; the dog and the motorcycle are already crops of crops. It is also the tallest per row, so it buys its identity with vertical space.