Designing an R package logo

I used to think of marketing and branding as activities that were only useful for companies selling a product. Now I realize that it is important any time you have created something that you want people to use or participate in, even if no money is changing hands. A brand helps create something recognizable and memorable so that people who, for example, need an open source tool for disease ecology simulations, will know where they can go to find such a tool.

To that end, when I got ready to release my R package epizootic, I knew it was time to come up with a logo for my package. The convention for R packages is to use a hexagonal logo. I downloaded some example SVGs from hexbin to get a sense of what my base hexagon should look like.

I wanted a design that represented the spatial modeling aspect of epizootic, as well as the reason why I developed it, which was to study viral emergence. I also wanted to give it a “dark mode” look, because I do absolutely everything in dark mode and I guess it’s just my aesthetic. That’s how I ended up landing on a wire-frame landscape (representing spatial modeling) with viruses floating above it, all in electric teal on a black background. For the font of epizootic, I chose sans serif because that looks more “science” and “programming” to me than a serif font.