Criticizing other people's figures on my webpage A few months ago I started collecting papers that contain figures I think convey information in a very efficient manner (i.e., figures that I think are very well illustrated and that should serve as examples of how they should be designed).

Now, because I am a huge data-vis geek, I have been thinking about opening a page on my website in which I talk about how I think figures should be designed and which principles I expect students/coauthors/general public to follow when illustrating data. Consequently, I am inclined towards including some of those amazing figures I have been collecting and talking about them (i.e., why they are efficient and well designed). More controversially, perhaps, is the fact that I also plan to include some figures that I believe were terribly designed and explain in which ways they fail (some of those badly designed figures are actually mine).

While I will seek the adequate rights to post them on my blog (e.g., through RightsLink for Elsevier journals), I would like to hear about the morality of this practice, particularly due to the fact that I will negatively criticize other authors' work.

Is there any moral (or even legal) problem in criticizing other people's figures on my website? Should I expect any sort of retaliation if I decide to do that? I understand that this is largely dependent on the tone I employ, but I will make every effort to be as technical and objective as possible.
I can't even imagine a situation in which criticizing published academic materials on their merits would be wrong or immoral.  

How would it be different from criticizing someone's selection of an econometric or statistical model to use on their data?  This happens constantly in academic literature, and in fact is crucial to the process of research.  The way data is conveyed to others through graphs is no less important than model selection, and both can be used to deceive or obscure.

So as long as you cover two bases:


Avoid ad hominem attacks, as you should in all sorts of reviewing, and
Follow any copyright rules the publishers impose,


Not only is there nothing wrong with doing it, I would argue that as an academic and data viz expert, you should do it.  As for someone taking offense at your criticism?  Well, as long as you're professionally criticizing its merits and avoiding problem number 1 from above then it's you who are in the right, and the one taking offense who is in the wrong.