Symbolizing Points by Varying Size

Good, clear symbology and limited color palettes are very common in newspapers and other news media. That is why we are going to make a map here with limited use of colors, but with as much expressiveness as possible.

In the map we are going to make, we visualize cities by means of semi-transparent circles, which vary in size based on the population. The transparency allows us to see both the overlap between cities, as well as the borders of provinces and countries under the circles. We'll also add nice label and create a Print Layout with an intuitive legend.

For this tutorial we'll use open data from Natural Earth. In the next section you'll learn how to download and load the data.

The materials are based on a course by Dirk Voets, lecturer at NOVI University of Applied Sciences and modified for this course by Hans van der Kwast.