D&AD President’s Award winner Jessica Walsh on the work that defined her career

Jessica Walsh has always had an entrepreneurial spirit. As a teenager, she built websites to help other creatives make their own sites, teaching herself how to grow an audience through creative work and eventually monetise it. As an Art Director at PRINT Magazine during the 2008 financial crisis, she taught herself photography and set design, and started creating cover and interior artwork for the publication, making herself valuable at a time when illustration and photography budgets were being slashed. It was here that Walsh began experimenting with techniques like body painting, which would inform her signature colourful handcraft set design style. Today, Walsh runs her own design studio, &Walsh, placing her in the 0.1% of female founders who have their own agency.

In an industry historically dominated by men, reaching the pinnacle is a rarity for women. However, to be a President’s Award recipient, accolades alone aren’t enough. You have to be an industry hero, and Walsh’s contributions to the industry go beyond her own successes. “Open a design history book, and you’ll see that almost all the famous designers mentioned are white men,” she says, referencing the fact that, even today, only 5-12% of creative directors or CEOs are women, depending on the country. “Once I started gaining success in the design industry, I had many haters on social media. I began to notice that many of the haters were other women. It made me realise that sometimes women can be unsupportive of other women, and I think that’s in part because our chance of reaching the top is so much slimmer than our male counterparts.”

This realisation inspired Walsh to create Ladies, Wine & Design, her non-profit where women can share resources and exchange ideas and inspiration. The organisation started as a small chapter in New York but has grown organically, now holding free mentorship circles, creative meetups, salon nights, and conferences in over 280 cities worldwide. “My hope is that as our chapters grow, it continues to be a space for folks to learn new skills, network their way into leadership positions, and ultimately change archaic statistics that show white, cis men dominating our industry.”

Rather than experiencing one big break, Walsh says she had a series of valuable opportunities that broadened her experiences and built her portfolio – from interning at Apple and then at Pentagram on Paula Scher's team, to that early job at PRINT magazine that allowed her to experiment with various design and photography styles. She says these roles gave her the expertise to work with Stefan Sagmeister at Sagmeister Inc., and later set up Sagmeister & Walsh with him as their own studio when she was 25-years-old.

Those who are familiar with Walsh’s work may know of the project that arguably catapulted her into the spotlight –'40 Days of Dating' –which was inspired by the insight that people often find themselves repeating old patterns in their relationships. Commitment-phobes move from one relationship to the next, while hopeless romantics are continually disappointed in their search for 'the one.' Walsh and her long-time friend Timothy Goodman designed an experiment where they dated each other for 40 days, blogging about their feelings and publishing without reading each other's entries. “One key lesson from this project that I continue to incorporate into my work is that it's okay to be vulnerable,” Walsh says of the experience. “In fact, being human is what truly resonates with people. We held nothing back in our blog posts about the relationship, and this honesty is what connected with so many readers. It went viral and landed us a book and movie deal.”

Other projects Walsh has worked on include the rebrand of an indoor vertical farming company Plenty that approached her company for a rebrand. The &Walsh team realised that the produce industry lacked interesting brands because most companies made their greens look just edible, not craveable. “Given the deliciousness of Plenty's produce, we asked ourselves: why can't greens be as craveable as a burger and fries?” says Walsh. To execute their idea, they borrowed the colour psychology used in appealing food categories like fast food and applied it to the produce aisle, enabling colour-blocking that helped Plenty stand out among competitors on the shelf.

&Walsh also worked on the relaunch for Frooti, a beloved mango juice brand in India. The team visited the country to survey the advertising landscape and study the various methods brands used for advertising and were surprised to find that much of the advertising was dense with language, which was complicated to execute given the country’s many different dialects. To set Frooti apart, they focussed on visual world-building that showcased Frooti's new packaging and emotionally connected with people across India, regardless of language.

Despite her many commercial successes, Walsh maintains that her personal projects are equally important. One such project is 'Pins Won’t Save the World', which aimed to connect with millennial voters and raise money for charities under the threat of Trump's administration. In just three months, they raised over $120,000 and 100% of the profits were donated to charity. Another project, 'Let’s Talk About Mental Health', is an open dialogue about mental health that takes place on its own website and on Instagram. The goal of this initiative is to destigmatise mental illness through design and encourage people to share their stories, with the hope that others will feel seen and heard after reading. “Making time for personal projects is like going to the gym,” says Walsh. “It’s hard at first to set aside time to do it, but if I do it regularly, it gives me so much more energy for life and work overall. I don’t think it distracts from the client's work, it fuels it.”

At the core of Walsh’s ethos is her acknowledgement that despite having faced adversities – including being a woman in an almost entirely male dominated industry at the top and mental health challenges – she had privileges that helped her. “It’s important to recognise privileges and understand that hard work, passion or persistence are sometimes not always enough to make it to the top,” says Walsh. “Trying to use our business resources and team creativity to advocate for more diversity and social causes, or shine a light on important topics like mental health, or pass on opportunities or shine a light on others' work, these things are really important to me.”

Since being awarded the D&AD President’s Award, Walsh has also launched, Type of Feeling, a retail and boutique type foundry that combines distinct and rarely spoken emotions with undeniable craft. Each typeface in the collection is inspired by specific feelings, which are embedded in the terminals, tails, counters, and more, bringing an emotional depth to typography. In addition to the retail offerings, Type of Feeling will provide custom typography services, helping brands and design teams discover their unique visual identities through bespoke typefaces.