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How to Make Symbol-based Glyph Charts, with R Examples

Using geometric shapes as an encoding can provide another dimension to your charts.

Scaled symbols are often used to show multiple variables at a time. I’m thinking bubble charts. The x-y coordinates represent a pair of values and the size of the symbol represents something else. Color can encode another variable.

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About the Author

Nathan Yau is a statistician who works primarily with visualization. He earned his PhD in statistics from UCLA, is the author of two best-selling books — Data Points and Visualize This — and runs FlowingData. Introvert. Likes food. Likes beer.