Jessica Walsh was born on Long Island in 1986. She taught herself HTML at eleven and was building websites for local businesses by fifteen. She studied graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 2008 — the same recession year that cut entry-level design hiring dramatically.
After internships at Print magazine and Pentagram New York, she joined Sagmeister Inc. as a designer. In 2012, at twenty-five, she became Stefan Sagmeister’s partner and the studio was renamed Sagmeister & Walsh. The partnership produced identity, editorial and exhibition work for Adobe, Snapchat, Levi’s, The New York Times and Aizone, among others.
In 2013 she published 40 Days of Dating — a collaborative online project with her friend Timothy Goodman in which they dated for forty days and published daily reflections with original illustration. The project attracted over 5 million unique visitors in its first year and was optioned by Warner Brothers, though film rights subsequently lapsed. It became a template for designer-led content projects.
In 2016 she founded Ladies, Wine & Design in response to the AIGA gender statistics showing women dramatically underrepresented in creative-director positions. The network is now active in over 250 cities worldwide and is a structural contribution to the profession rather than a design project.
In 2019 Sagmeister & Walsh was dissolved amicably, with Sagmeister returning to solo practice and Walsh founding &Walsh in the same New York office. She teaches in the M.F.A. Designer as Author program at the School of Visual Arts.
