Hexagon stickers have become a popular way to make software tools, and R packages in particular, visually recognizable and stand out as landmarks in an ever-growing ecosystem. In general, good hexagon logos are not only visually appealing but also convey the key aspects of a package with their graphical design.
In this talk, we will showcase rTRhexNG (https://github.com/miraisolutions/rTRhexNG#readme), a Shiny app built for creating the hexagon sticker of the rTRNG (https://github.com/miraisolutions/rTRNG#readme) package. The core idea behind the logo was to have an appealing design that would at the same time illustrate the key features of the package: jump and split operations on (pseudo-)random sequences. Leveraging on the simple yet powerful SVG image format, R was used to automate the creation and location of several visual elements representing random sequences, and a Shiny app was built on top to quickly assess different designs in an interactive way.
We demonstrate the Shiny app in action to concretely explain what jump and split mean in rTRNG, and show how the sticker design naturally emerges from their visual representation. The power of this interactive yet automated approach was invaluable to fine-tune the final look of the sticker, also allowing to easily explore alternative polygon or circle designs the implementation naturally extends to.