.claims — layout optionsNineteen ways to draw the thirteen injury claims. Round 1 (C1–C7·b) works the grid, with the four-column version drawn three times because of what four does to thirteen. Round 2 (C8–C13) changes the family — a wall with no gutters, an index with one preview, a stagger, a strip, a circle, and home_v1's own checkerboard. Round 3 (C14–C17) leaves the tile behind altogether: a band, a slice, an editorial row, a poster. H·a–H·c at the end are not layouts: they are the hover question, drawn at rest and hovered. 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.
| option | height at 1280 | tile | last row |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 — grid, caption under | 671px | 230×173 | three of five |
| C2 — caption on the image | 722px | 230×230 | three of five |
| C6 — hexagon tiles | 945px | 230×266 | three of five |
| C5 — a row per group | 1018px | 193 / 302 / 411 | each row is full |
| C3 — mosaic, one leading | 1088px | 296×220, lead 624×472 | no hole at all |
| four columns — 1280 = 4 × 296 + 3 × 32 | |||
| C7 — four across, as it falls | 1096px | 296×222 | one beside three holes |
| C7·b — last row centred | 1096px | 296×222 | one, centred |
| C7·a — first claim across the top | 1179px | 296×222, band 1280×300 | no hole at all |
| C4 — rows with thumbnails | 1314px | 96×72 | one column, no ragged row |
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Adi asked for a four-column grid, and this is it, drawn honestly: 1280 = 4 × 296 + 3 × 32, tile 296×222. Four is the column count thirteen likes least — 4 + 4 + 4 leaves one claim alone on a fourth row beside three empty cells. Five leaves a row of three, which reads as a row; one tile beside three holes reads as a mistake, and no amount of styling changes that. What the width buys is real though: at 296px the tile is 28% wider than C1's 230, so the photographs are the biggest of any even grid here.
The orphan cured by changing the count, not by stretching a tile. The first claim takes the whole top row at 1280×300 and the other twelve fill three rows of four exactly — 1 + 4 + 4 + 4 = 13, nothing left over. Same trick as C3 and the same question behind it: this only works if one claim genuinely leads, and which one is the firm's call. Cost: the band is 1280px of photograph, and only two of the thirteen sources are wide enough not to be cropped hard to fill it.
The orphan cured by moving it. Flexbox rather than grid, so the short row centres itself; the three full rows are untouched, because 4 × 296 + 3 × 32 is exactly 1280 and there is nothing to centre until the row that is short. The cheapest fix on the sheet — one property — and it keeps all thirteen the same size, which C7·a does not. Cost: a centred single tile still announces that the count did not divide; it just does it politely.
Zero gap, so the thirteen read as one photographic block rather than thirteen objects on a page. Five across is 256px — the home page's own lattice, 5 × 256 = 1280 — and the last row's three divide the same 1280 at 426.67 each, so every row reaches both edges and the ragged last row simply does not occur. That is a different answer to thirteen from C3's and C7·a's: not change the count, change what a row is. Cost: no air at all between one accident and the next, which on this subject matter is a tonal decision as much as a layout one.
Thirteen names and one photograph: the picture changes with the cursor instead of thirteen competing at once. Pure CSS — the previews are siblings of the names, so :nth-child(n):hover ~ :nth-child(n+13) reaches the right one and no script is needed. It is also the only option on the sheet that fixes the 2.4 MB, because twelve of the thirteen images can be loaded lazily and most visitors will never ask for them. Cost, and it is a real one: there is no hover on a phone. On touch this needs a tap-to-show or it degrades to a plain list — which is C4 minus the thumbnails.
The same 230.4 cell as C1 with every second column half a tile lower, so the eye reads a rhythm instead of four straight rules across the section. The stagger is a translate, not a margin, so the grid still lays out as a plain grid and nothing has to be reordered for it. Costs 105px — half a tile — and nothing else. Cost that is not in pixels: a staggered grid is harder to scan than a straight one, and this is an index.
One row, scrolled sideways: 13 × 230.4 + 12 × 16 = 3,187px of strip in a 1,280px window, so about five of the thirteen are visible at once. By far the shortest thing on the sheet, which matters if this section has to sit under a hero and above a footer without owning the page. Cost, and on an index it is the objection that decides: it hides eight of the thirteen. A visitor who does not drag never learns the firm handles dog attacks.
A different shape family from C6's hexagons, and the arithmetic is worth having before either is rejected on cropping: a circle keeps π/4 = 78.5% of its frame; the hexagon keeps exactly 3/4. Circles crop less than the brand shape does. What a circle costs instead is the brand — it is the one shape on this sheet that says nothing about this firm — and it suits faces, which is what circles are usually for, better than it suits a crashed car.
home_v1 has no hero — its first screen is .triage, a gutterless checkerboard of white type cells and photographs, 5 × 280px, tone alternating orange and teal, with a hexagon marker that scales in under the cursor. That construction is lifted part for part. Seven claims arrive as a photograph and six as a word, and which six is decided by position, not importance — so, borrowing the triage's own flip, a type cell reveals its own photograph on hover and no claim is left without one. One thing is deliberately not copied. home_v1 sets these headings in brand orange and brand teal at 21px weight 300: on white that is 3.03:1 and 2.60:1, and 21px at weight 300 is not large text, so the floor is 4.5:1. Both fail; teal fails even the 3:1 large-text floor. Here the heading is brown (10.87:1) and the orange and teal move to the rule and the marker, which are non-text and need only 3:1. The alternation survives, the failure does not — and the same fix is owed to the homepage. Cost beyond the checkerboard: thirteen still does not divide by five, so the block ends two cells short on the third row. C8 cures that by letting the last row divide the full width; doing the same here would break the 256px module the triage is built on, so it is left visible rather than fixed with a trick borrowed from another option.
Thirteen full-width bands, 64px each at rest — 13 × 64 = 832 with no grid at all — opening to 240 under the cursor. The picture does something no tile here does: it runs the whole 1280, so the section reads as a stack of horizons rather than a wall of objects. Cost is arithmetic: a 1280 × 64 band is a 20:1 crop, and twelve of the thirteen sources are between 0.71:1 and 2.00:1, so at rest each one is a slit through the middle of its frame. The layout only shows a photograph while the cursor is on it.
The same idea turned ninety degrees: thirteen slices side by side, 96.6px each at rest — (1280 − 12 gaps of 2) / 13 — opening to about four times that. The only option on the sheet whose height does not depend on thirteen — it is 420 whatever the count becomes, which is worth knowing for a practice area that keeps growing. Cost: the names have to be set vertically to fit a 96.6px column and vertical type is slower to read; and a 96.6 × 420 sliver is a 1:4.35 crop, the narrowest anything is cropped anywhere on this sheet.
Photograph and copy alternating sides, one claim per row. The family every other option here is avoiding: each claim gets a whole row of the page and a 520 × 280 photograph — the largest any single claim gets except C3's lead. Its cost is not a trade-off, it is a number: thirteen rows. See the table. It is the layout for a page whose job is to be read through, and an index's job is to be scanned.
01Car Accident ClaimsRead this claim →
02Motorcycle Accident ClaimsRead this claim →
03Cyclist Accident ClaimsRead this claim →
04Passenger Injury ClaimsRead this claim →
05Pedestrian Injury ClaimsRead this claim →
06Hit and Run Injury ClaimsRead this claim →
07Slip and FallRead this claim →
08Premises Liability ClaimsRead this claim →
09School Accident ClaimsRead this claim →
10Product Liability ClaimsRead this claim →
11Dog AttackRead this claim →
12Boating AccidentsRead this claim →
13Assault & BatteryRead this claim →One photograph behind the whole section and thirteen names over it. Like C9 it puts a single image on the page — the 2,427 KB answered — but with no interaction at all, so it behaves the same on a phone, which is exactly where C9 fails. White on rgba(0,0,0,.78) measures 6.4:1 over this photograph and would be 5.4:1 over the brightest of the thirteen, so the veil is safe whichever picture is chosen later. Which one that is, is a decision — right now the whole of injury law is illustrated by a car accident.
The literal request, and the measurement is the answer: eleven of the thirteen photographs are already black and white in the source file, so filter:grayscale(0) returns nothing on eleven of them. Look at the hovered row — only the cyclist and the pedestrian change. A hover that works on two tiles in thirteen is worse than no hover, because the reader learns the rule from whichever tile they touch first and the other eleven then look broken.
What the request actually wants, delivered on all thirteen. An orange layer with mix-blend-mode:color takes its HUE from the brand and its LUMINANCE from the photograph, so it does not care whether the source had colour: every tile warms identically. It is also the only version that is the firm's colour rather than whatever the stock photograph happened to be shot in. Cost: it is a strong effect, and orange over a dark photograph goes muddy — the dog and the passenger tiles are the ones to judge it on.
No colour at all: brightness(1.18) contrast(1.06), so the tile brightens under the cursor. Works on thirteen for the same reason H·b does — it asks nothing of the source — and it keeps the page monochrome, which is the tone every other page in this rebuild is already in. The quietest of the three, and the only one that survives the November shoot changing every photograph.