Along the way, you'll learn about common design decisions that will help you create effective symbology for your own thematic maps. You'll symbolize province polygons, city points, and road lines. In this tutorial, you'll build a simple, clear, and attractive map of population in Indonesia. The map designer is less concerned with making the map resemble the place and more concerned with presenting a clear communication of the data, its patterns, and the message they want to convey with it. The color, size, and shape of symbols are varied so the most important map features are the most obvious, and the quantitative and qualitative relationships between the data are clear. As a result, thematic symbology is more abstract.
While a topographic or reference map mostly depicts things that are visible on the ground, such as lakes, roads, or forests, a thematic map often visualizes phenomena that are not, such as election results, habitat ranges, and agricultural suitability.