Edel Rodriguez on the Risk of Staying Quiet

Edel Rodriguez refuses to be small or quiet. He’s the illustrator behind some of the most recognizable political images of the last decade. That 2016 cover for TIME Magazine, the one of Donald Trump melting down: that was Edel. The Der Spiegel cover of Trump beheading the Statue of Liberty. Also Edel. At this point, he's produced more than 300 images of a single, very orange, subject. As a kid who grew up in a country where saying the wrong thing about the wrong leader was dangerous, Edel has spent his career speaking up.In this conversation, Edel talks about hustling his way into an art director at just 26 years old. We talk about how that experience informed his editorial illustration process. We talk about how social media is a great place to share the kind of work you want to be making and to rally interest until someone notices. We get into how he wrote his graphic memoir Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey backwards, designing the cover years before he wrote a word. We talk about how the book's ending—a visual rhyme between the events in Havana in January 1959 and the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021—came together at the very last minute. He talks candidly about why he refuses to self-censor, why he's not tired of the Trump-based work, and why the question he'd most want to ask himself in twenty years isn't about politics at all.This episode is for illustrators, designers, and anyone else who's been told to play it safe—and isn't sure they want to.Hear Edel speak at the DesignThinkers conference, Canada's premier design conference, in Toronto and online this October 20–21, 2026. Follow us on Instagram @rgdcanada or visit us online at rgd.ca. Purchase tickets to the upcoming DesignThinkers conference at designthinkers.com.