Jessica Walsh

Jessica Walsh (born October 30, 1986) is an American designer, art director, illustrator and educator.

Walsh was born on October 30, 1986, in New York and raised in Ridgefield, Connecticut.

She began coding and designing websites at age 11.

After a year of making her own websites and blogs, she made a website for kids to learn how to code using HTML and CSS and to make their own websites.

Walsh became interested in coding from building a website homepage for her Neopet.

Eventually her website had about 50,000 people visiting per day.

She put Google Ads on her site and made a couple thousand dollars per month.

This was a turning point for Walsh because she realized she could make money from design and websites.

Walsh chose to go an art school to advance her design knowledge.

Walsh went on to study graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where she received a BFA degree in 2008.

After college, Walsh moved to New York City to intern at the design firm Pentagram.

She turned down a job at Apple where she was offered nearly $100,000 annually to accept the internship under Paula Scher at Pentagram, where she would stay for nearly a year.

Walsh has stated that she turned down the Apple job offer because she knew she would be doing one type of design for one client that already had an established look and feel.

She knew her goal was to open her own studio and this job was not on the route to her goal.

She then worked as an associate art director at Print magazine and had design work and illustrations appear in the New York Times and New York Times Magazine.

In reflections about her time at Print magazine, she identifies it as one of the best things to happen in her career as it was how she found and developed her personal style.

She was a partner of the design studio Sagmeister & Walsh (2010–2019), and the founder of the creative agency &Walsh (2019–present).

&Walsh is one of the .1% of creative agencies owned by women.

She has taught at the School of Visual Arts (SVA).

In February 2010, Jessica Walsh sent Stefan Sagmeister a “super-long, emotional email, unsure of where to go in life.” Walsh had never met Sagmeister before and the email only had the intention of trying to get some guidance.

They soon met up and Sagmeister looked through Walsh's portfolio and offered her a job.

Two years later in 2012, she became partners with Stefan Sagmeister to form Sagmeister & Walsh.

Walsh primarily worked with clients while Sagmeister traveled more and focused on his films.

In homage to a nude self-portrait Sagmeister had sent out to announce the formation of his own firm 19 years prior, the new partners released a photo of themselves naked in their office to announce the renaming of the firm to Sagmeister & Walsh.

Blending handcraft, photography and painting with digital design, Walsh works primarily on branding, typography, website design and art installations.

Her style has been described as "bold, emotional and provocative" with the occasional surrealistic flourish, and her art has been said to look "hand-made and at times quite daring."

Walsh and Sagmeister collaborated on Six Things: Sagmeister & Walsh, an exhibition that opened at the Jewish Museum in March 2013, and ran for five months.

For the exhibit, an exploration of happiness, they created a sound-activated sculpture and five short films.

Walsh has worked on projects for clients including Levi's, Aizone, Adobe and Colab Eyewear, and rebranding efforts for The Jewish Museum of New York and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut.

Some other popular clients Walsh has worked with includes.

BMW, Snapchat, Barneys New York and Parle Argo, “the Coca-Cola of India.”

In 2013, Walsh and fellow designer and friend Tim Goodman decided to date for 40 days to see if they could overcome their relationship issues and fall in love.

They documented the social experiment on a website, 40 Days of Dating, launched in July 2013.

The website is a blog and has entries from both Walsh and Goodman everyday answering the same questions throughout the 40 days.

They answered the same questions each day which were;

In support of the blog, which earned more than 5 million unique visitors in less than a year, they appeared in segments on talk shows Today and The View.

In September 2013, Warner Brothers purchased the film rights, with a screenplay to be written by Lorene Scafaria, and Michael Sucsy attached to direct.

In July 2019, Walsh announced she was going to leave Sagmeister & Walsh and forming her own studio, &Walsh.

Walsh has said that the studio is a fulfillment of her dreams as a teen to run her own business and the studio will become one of 36 female-led creative studios in the United States.

&Walsh works with brands in early stages.