I have an “Old Glory Problem” (just coined that phrase.) I have n icons (stars in the case of the flag, Favicons in the case of this site) and I need to arrange them in a visually-appealing way.
It regards the “Presence” feature I developed (look to your right on The Real Site.) I keep thinking of sites I can add. My first crop was fifteen, and I used a 5×3 grid. When it got to sixteen, a pleasant 4×4 grid. Then it was seventeen.
The cutest I could come up with is:
This would be roughly bounded by an astroid whatever a convex astroid would be — actually, among simple shapes, a parallelogram might be the optimal bounding box.
It seems the ideal arrangement for the eye to find it pretty is — what? — symmetry? Preferably along two axes? I suspect that this rule of thumb could be programmed and a set of “pretty” solutions would be spat out (1/2/3/5/3/2/1 in this case.)
Anyone want to take a stab at either telling me what the real name of this problem is, or writing a bit of code? Maybe at some time other than 02h30 I can do it myself.
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Would 18 be best as “1/3/5/5/3/1″, “6/6/6″, or something else, for instance?