12 published examples
The review question I keep asking is: can I name the one idea this grid is arguing? If I cannot, the tiles are competing. Scale should do more work than decoration. A double-width product shot or an oversized stat tells people where to look first. Equal cards work when the product really is a set of peers, like payments, CRM, and email sitting side by side. They fail when one capability is the actual reason to buy. Watch the UI chrome. Cropped product surfaces sell specificity, but they go muddy if type inside the mock is smaller than the caption outside. Photography-led tiles need a contrast plan for type and buttons; fashion images already fight for attention. Dense metric grids need breathing room and a limited palette, or they become a dashboard nobody invited. On small screens the irregular mosaic usually becomes a stack. The order of that stack is the real design: the former hero tile should still lead, and orphaned stats should not land first. I tend to test by covering the largest tile. If the leftover grid still makes sense, the supporting claims are doing their job.
A bento earns its complexity when several claims need to be seen together and they are not equally important. Scale can rank a hero capability against supporting proof. A vertical list is cleaner when the story is sequential, or when there is no visual evidence worth cropping. If every item would get the same size tile, you probably wanted a list.
The stronger examples stay graspable in one look: a few large cells, or a dense mosaic with one obvious lead. Past that, headlines, screenshots, and stats stop reading as one argument. A practical test: describe the section in one sentence. If you need a clause for every tile, split the grid or cut a claim.
Irregular column spans collapse into a single column, and the original lead can sink. A side stat may greet people first. Treat the stacked sequence as its own composition. Keep in-tile interface crops simple; tiny dashboard chrome that works at desktop width becomes noise when the card is full-bleed on a phone.
