Section badge — .hexfill, 10 options

The badge that opens a section (.cards-sec and the practice-area sections use it four times on the homepage). Every option keeps the brand hexagon — pointy-top, the same proportion as polygon.svg — and only changes how it is drawn: filled, outlined, paired, clustered, inline, or reduced to a watermark. Stages are on the new off-white (#F9F9F9), not the replica's plain white. Cards below each heading are abbreviated — they are context for the badge, not the thing being judged.

Today: a 95×110 solid teal cell with a white FontAwesome icon, centred, 22px above the heading — a straight carry-over from the current site. It is the least considered element on the page: the icon is generic (fa-rss, fa-youtube-play) and the teal is the brand's minor accent doing major work.

Round 2 — with hover

Read this before picking one. A hover effect only pays for itself when the thing under the cursor is actually clickable — otherwise it is an easter egg nobody finds, and on a phone it does not exist at all. So these split into two families. X11–X13, X16–X18 make the badge + heading a real link to the section's archive ("Read Our Featured Articles" → the blog index); the hover is then a promise the click keeps. X14–X15 are section-level: the cursor anywhere in the section wakes the badge, claiming no affordance — pure atmosphere, safe on a badge that stays decorative. Every effect is CSS-transition only and switches off under prefers-reduced-motion, same rule as the header and the B19 button.