Jorge Rodríguez Diez (known professionally as R10) is a Cincinnati‑based graphic designer, born in Havana, Cuba, in 1969. He is widely regarded as an expert in visual communication and a leading voice in the field of visual culture and the interpretation of its narratives.

With more than three decades of experience in design and communication strategy, he combines rigorous academic training with a finely honed instinct for the aesthetics and psychology of visual messages. He graduated in 1988 as an illustrator and graphic artist from the Instituto Politécnico de Diseño Informacional, and in 1995 earned his degree in Visual Communication Design from Havana’s Instituto Superior de Diseño (ISDI).

Rodríguez Diez specializes in the analysis, creation, and strategic deployment of visual language in its broadest sense. Drawing on his experience as a professor of semiotics, typography, and editorial design at ISDI, he is uniquely positioned to advise institutions, companies, and creators on how to shape identity and discourse through visual means. His expertise extends naturally to pedagogy—the design and implementation of formative methodologies—and to writing incisive criticism on art and design.

Within graphic design, his practice spans brand identity, logo development, advertising communication, exhibition graphics, and editorial design.

In 2006 he founded R10 Studio, a creative consultancy and design practice devoted to cultural and corporate communication. He has collaborated extensively with major Cuban institutions such as the Cuban Fund of Cultural Assets, the National Council for the Arts (CNAP), ArteCubano publishing house, and the Wifredo Lam Contemporary Art Center, contributing to projects ranging from publications to exhibition identities and complex design systems. His ability to articulate visual strategies that are both culturally resonant and communicatively precise has made him a sought‑after collaborator across disciplines.

After relocating to the United States, he became deeply engaged with institutions devoted to the visual arts. He currently serves as Executive Director of Annex Gallery in Cincinnati, Editor‑in‑Chief of its publication Annex Update, and Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas in Kendall, Miami, where he previously served for three years as Executive Director. He also advises and collaborates with other respected organizations, including the Coral Gables Museum in Miami, and contributes to numerous private collecting initiatives.

In parallel with his design practice, R10 has exhibited his own work in significant artistic contexts, with solo exhibitions in Havana, Madrid, New York, Cincinnati, and Baku, Azerbaijan. His work has been included in more than one hundred group exhibitions worldwide, and several of his pieces have been sold through Christie’s.

Though his studio remains rooted in the analysis of visual communication, consultancy, and design practice, his artistic work expands and deepens his understanding of the image as both message and medium—an understanding he brings to every project, whether academic, editorial, curatorial, or commercial. He welcomes thoughtful collaboration, informed dialogue, and opportunities to contribute his expertise to ventures where clarity of vision and richness of meaning are held in the highest regard.

This blog was born of a desire to look with a critical eye—not only at images themselves, but at their connection to the author and the context that surrounds them. It seeks to deepen our understanding of their formal and symbolic structures, to learn how to read them with precision and depth. Its scope reaches from advertising campaigns to contemporary works, both saturated with signs. Each visual piece is approached as a site of meaning: an investigation into how signifiers shape significance beyond the confines of an image’s initial intent. It is a space for those who sense that every image speaks beyond appearances… and are willing to look twice.

This project rests on a rigorous analysis of visual language, guided by the experience and perspective of its author, Jorge Rodríguez Diez. With more than three decades in graphic design—particularly in service of the visual arts—Rodríguez Diez has cultivated a finely tuned understanding of the formal and communicative dimensions of the image. His years as a professor at Havana’s Instituto Superior de Diseño, where he taught courses on image semiotics, attest both to his interpretive insight and to his clarity as an educator.

As a visual artist, he has challenged and reimagined orthodox visual narratives. Since 2022, as Executive Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas in Miami, he has curated and produced numerous exhibitions, assuming responsibility for their conceptual direction, critical framing, and historical documentation.

This synthesis of practical experience, theoretical depth, and curatorial vision uniquely positions him to offer, through this platform, a thoughtful and incisive inquiry into image, meaning, and the ever‑evolving landscape of contemporary visual culture.

It focuses on the analysis of autonomous images—photographs, designs, or works of art—selected at random from social networks, magazines, or media outlets of every scale and reach. These images are approached as visual events rather than mere documents. Each one is examined with the eye of a semiologist: attentive to composition, formal values, inner and outer rhythm, and, above all, the silent structures that shape their meaning—or their absence of it. Here, images are not explained solely through their context or the author’s intent; instead, they open themselves to alternative readings, to possible narratives, to symbolic resonances. At times, the stories recovered from their involuntary silences speak with as much force as those handed down by the artist or by prior interpretations.

A space devoted to the critical analysis of advertising pieces from a visual standpoint.

It is not about judging products or market strategies, but about exploring how messages are built through visual means—what visual resources they employ and what implications these hold for their reading and interpretation. We proceed from the assumption that the creators and commissioners of these works seek to ensure their own objectives: to construct favorable narratives.

It is at this juncture that analysis either supports or challenges their likely success or failure, whether in terms of potential impact or historical confirmation.

Each advertisement is approached as a cultural artifact capable of influencing, persuading, or questioning, always appealing to the viewer’s visual intelligence.

A dynamic window into what’s happening across the art world: exhibitions, movements, and controversies spanning the U.S. and Europe to the rising scenes of Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, and vibrant corners of Asia. Because art never stands still—and neither do its stories.

This section steps deliberately away from the old scaffolding of traditional art criticism and ventures into the work itself as a charged field of signifiers. The point is not to weigh aesthetic merit or rehearse institutional verdicts, but to dismantle the image, to trace how its visual, symbolic, and formal elements conspire, collide, and cohere. What matters here is a reading attuned to the power of the sign: what is revealed, what is withheld, and what trembles in that fertile in‑between.

The goal is not to pin the work down by invoking the artist’s style, résumé, or historical context, but to listen—to let the visual language speak as a self-contained system of meaning. Each essay turns its gaze on works of formidable formal, symbolic, or conceptual force within contemporary art—pieces that refuse complacency, that challenge the viewer and invite thought well beyond the polished surface. Here, analysis becomes a tool for unveiling, and the image itself becomes a terrain alive with resonances.

This section addresses facts or events that, at first glance, bear no direct relation to any specific image or defined body of images. Yet their relevance emerges within the realm of narrative: they resonate with a symbolic repertoire that underpins and enriches an already established visual storyline.

Such commentary springs from an imagined visual construction—one shaped through education, through the repetition of cultural codes, or through particular interests that contour collective perception. In this way, both a specific social group and the casual viewer can detect in these events visual echoes that, while not anchored in any single work, actively participate in the network of meanings that sustains and expands that narrative.