Designer • Illustrator • Other stuff

Jared Rodriguez

Based in Portland, OR

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About

I’m a designer and illustrator in Portland, Oregon. My background is in nonprofit news, where I created hundreds of published illustrations and led the art direction on a major website redesign. These days, I work independently across editorial illustration, creative direction, and design for publications and the web.

Illustration

45 pieces

Editorial art for national news & analysis, covering incarceration, surveillance, labor, economic inequality, climate and more. Plus book and podcast work.

Selected

Collage with woman in foreground, megaphone over her shoulder, with stars and globes graphics and bubbles showing organizing snapshots — **Organizing Youth Under Fascism**Convergence Magazine · Collage · 2026

Portraits of women in prison settings viewed in concentric circles of razorwire — **Women Inside**Truthout · Illustration

Zombies with shopping carts and baskets, one checking phone, as fire and lightning blaze in background — **Zombie Capitalism**Truthout · Illustration

Exploiting More Than LandTruthout · Illustration

Hands connect through prison visitation window — **Severed Ties**Truthout · Illustration

A lineup of police officers with eyes in their chests, with one approaching with the eye closed. — **Body Cameras**Truthout · Illustration

A person chained by the ankle with binary 1s and 0s to a giant floating eye — **E-carceration**Truthout · Illustration

Editorial

Collage of protesters with graphic outburst and wave eroding a politician's image — How We Survive and Turn the Tide

Collage of sparring hands with pens causing star-shaped sparks with a backdrop of collaborating people and partial checkerboard pattern — A Real Strategy for Power

Madonna and Child image with surveillance cameras for heads — Madonna and Child of Surveillance

A prisoner is backed into a corner as a hand reaches down with a pen, opening up a red chasm at her feet — Punished for Existing

Collage of a crowd facing cables from a data center, with floating data centers and noxious smoke above and waves of water below — No Opting Out

A child in an abstract landscape with an open doorway, giant globe and apple, media devices and implements — Unschooling

Men in suits with red right wings and talons clutching arrows emerging out the backs of their heads — Right-wingers

Collage featuring Alphonso Mayfield, SEIU shield, symbols of the Florida neighborhood The Set and palm trees — A Vision of Community Unionism

A man behind prison bars that are also thermometers with increasingly high temperatures — Prison Heat

A woman, face obscrued by shadows, with the figure of a professor behind a lectern in front of whiteboard, and four older professional figures facing away in the background — Anything to Avoid a Scandal

Red business hands reach to clutch the Portland water reservoir — Portland Water Takeover

People hold hands standing against giants in suits with pipeline heads dripping oil — Water Protectors

Gloved hands pass a prisoner between them with barbed wire in background — Detention to Deportation

Collage of faces in boxes with wireframes and two puppeteering hands — Everyone Thinks the Narrative Is Rigged

A man cooks a meal on a stove top with prison fencing backdrop — Dream of Cooking

Collage with extraction machines looming over Earth with data center server cables — Extractivism

New Mexico flag design formed out of oil pipelines with a flare burning at the top and sickly rain pouring down — Fracking New Mexico

A person watering their lawn with a hose looks up at a drone's silhouette — Backyard Drone

Oversized police figure directs students in one direction — School-to-Prison Pipeline

Red-handed businessman shoves oversized hundred dollar bills into his very being. — Self-Dealing

High angle looking down on a prisoner walking between the shadows of prison bars. — Prison Steps

A woman in grayscale pulls back a curtain to reveal a colorful and joyful demonstration — Behind the Curtain

Orange Crush

Reimagine the Means of Production

Woman speaks into a megaphone during protest — Speak Out

A figure in a suit representing the oil industry claims a university building, leaving oily marks on it. — Oil-Funded Universities

Raised fists holding tools of media and creation — Media Resistance

Illustration of a prisoner reading a letter that casts illumination up toward him. — Prison Pen Pals

Exploiting More Than Land

Showing 35 of 35

Books

Media
Control

Cover & interior series · Bloomsbury · 2015

Cover and interior illustration for Media Control: News as an Institution of Power and Social Control by Robert E. Gutsche, Jr.

Author: Robert E. Gutsche, Jr. · Publisher: Bloomsbury · Cover credit: “with illustrations by Jared Rodriguez”

Media Control book cover — a multi-armed news media figure with a blank television for a face — Cover as published — Bloomsbury, 2015

Cover illustration: multi-armed news media figure with a blank TV face

Two figures representing militarism and media taking selfies

News media merged with the Crossing of the Delaware and modern militarism

A saluting soldier silhouette on a TV over a helicopter of distressed newsprint

Hands typing on the typewriter keys of a grenade

A typing silhouette over a megaphone made of distressed newsprint

Protesters emerging out of cell phone with media figure recording in background, made of distressed newsprint

Eight interior plates.

Podcasts

Truthout
Podcasts

Cover art & series identity · 2 shows

Identity artwork for two recurring Truthout podcasts, Climate Frontlines and Movement Memos.

Truthout · Ongoing series artwork

Climate Frontlines podcast cover — the Earth and raised fists — Climate Frontlines

Movement Memos podcast cover — host Kelly Hayes at a rainy protest — Movement Memos

Art Direction

Work I briefed, commissioned and directed.

Truthout
Site Redesign

Art Direction · Design · 2018

Truthout rebuilt twice while I was there. I ran testing and stakeholder sign-off on the first WordPress migration, then art directed the one that followed. Briefed and directed an outside designer, and reconciled what editorial wanted with what the developers could build. When the designer’s contract ended I contributed designs to additional features.

Design: Drew Warkentin · Development: R. Scott LaMorte, Takahiro Noguchi · With Truthout editorial & production staff

Asset needed

Before / after of the 2018 redesign, plus one or two feature screens you designed after the contract ended — those are the ones that are unambiguously yours.

Infinite
Issues

Art Direction · Commissioned · Motion

Commissioned and directed cover art, interior design, a trading-card set and an animated end-credit sequence across a team of illustrators and designers. I wrote and illustrated the cards myself.

Art: Crystal Carter · Design: Jeff Hammond · End credits: Ethan Slayton