We can draw a bubble chart by using svg to render a circle of the appropriate size, and at the appropriate position for each datapoint.
In this example, each data point consists of 3 numbers which we can use to plot the x and y position and the radius of each circle
var w = 500; var h = 500; var dataset = [ [5, 20, 5], [480, 90, 5], [250, 50, 10], [100, 33, 15], [330, 95, 5], [410, 12, 10], [475, 44, 20], [25, 67, 15], [85, 21, 5], [220, 88, 10] ]; var colors = d3.scale.category10(); var scaleX = d3.scale.linear(); scaleX.domain([0, 500]); scaleX.range([50, 480]); var scaleY = d3.scale.linear(); scaleY.domain([0, 100]); scaleY.range([450, 20]); //Create SVG element var svg = d3.select("#draw_here") .append("svg") .attr("width", w) .attr("height", h); svg.selectAll("circle") .data(dataset) .enter() .append("circle") .attr("cx", function (d) { return scaleX(d[0]); }) .attr("cy", function (d) { return scaleY(d[1]); }) .attr("r", function (d) { return d[2]; }) .attr("fill", function (d, i) { return colors(i); }); svg.selectAll("text") .data(dataset) .enter() .append("text") .text(function (d) { return d[0] + "," + d[1] + "," + d[2]; }) .attr("x", function (d) { return scaleX(d[0]); }) .attr("y", function (d) { return scaleY(d[1]) - d[2] - 5; }) .attr("font-family", "sans-serif") .attr("font-size", "11px") .attr("text-anchor", "middle"); var xAxis = d3.svg.axis() .scale(scaleX) .orient("bottom"); var yAxis = d3.svg.axis() .scale(scaleY) .orient("left"); svg.append("g") .attr("class", "axis") .attr("transform", "translate(0," + (h - 50) + ")") .call(xAxis); svg.append("g") .attr("class", "axis") .attr("transform", "translate(" + 50 + ", 0)") .call(yAxis);