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Topf gets taken to Dr. Zen’s Design Woodshed

I try to design nice posters and one that I was particularly proud of was 2013’s Assessment of the Nephrology Blogosphere that I presented at Kidney Week. 
PDF | Powerpoint
A few months ago I submitted it for a design critique at Dr. Zen‘s Better Posters. Well this tweet surfaced today:

I blog about a poster about blogging. #meta http://t.co/r7pg4Nxeiu See what works, what doesn’t on this poster! pic.twitter.com/kyBYxRvK6A
— Zen Faulkes (@DoctorZen) December 18, 2014

The review isn’t pretty:

The colours in the table are not explained anywhere. I am guessing “green”means statistically significant, and “orange” means… a decline in posts over time? Maybe that could be mentioned in the main text at the left. 

The table is big and dense. Again, I wonder if it could be simplified, either graphically (first step: remove the vertical gridline!) or even removed. If I’m reading it right, some of the information in the table is repeated in the graphs to the right of the table. 

The last line of the table – “Totals” – appears to be incorrect. It looks like most of those entries are means, not totals. 

Also, the text mentions 30 blogs, but only 22 are plotted.

I only plotted the 22 with the longest duration of publication. What was the point of graphing KidneyTalk‘s 6 posts over 2 months? (4 years after the last post, she still owns the URL) 
I also disagree with his critique of the QRcode and bit.ly link. I think QR codes mostly suck and for most people snapping a pic of a URL is quicker and more reliable. I also think every person should have a little home page for their poster where it can be downloaded and supplementary information made available. See the homepage to this year’s NephMadness poster.
Overall this was great feedback and I swear my next poster will be better.