Joseph Claude Sinel (27 September 1889 – 27 January 1975) also known as Jo Sinel or "Auckland Jo", was a pioneering New-Zealand-born American industrial designer. Referred to in his lifetime and since as the father of American industrial design, he established what many regarded as the country's first industrial design practice.

Sinel was born in Auckland, New Zealand, son of Thomas Edwin Sinel (1861–1928) and Eliza Janice Motion (1856–1926); one of some eleven siblings. His father, born at Saint Helier, Jersey, was then working as Tally Clerk at Queen Street wharf, progressing to prominence on the waterfront as the representative of various overseas shipping companies.

Sinel once said it was Thomas Umfrey Wells, headmaster of Richmond Road School and exceptional educator, who advised him to become an "artist". After leaving school in about 1904, he set out on that path with work in the art department of Wilson & Horton, lithographers and publishers of The New Zealand Herald, for some five years, as well as training through the art and design course at Auckland Technical College. There, without any definite thoughts on design at that point, he studied under the British industrial artist, Harry Wallace, who'd emigrated from England to take up appointment as an instructor at the college in 1904. Wallace had designed mass-production pottery, worked on staff at the Wedgwood Institute, Staffordshire, and exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts. At college, examinations in science and art were carried out in connection with the Board of Education, South Kensington, London, (South Kensington system) through which Sinel gained first-class passes in drawing in 1908 and 1909, and in design in 1910. It is also commonly understood that he attended Elam School of Art.

After Wilson & Horton, Sinel freelanced in Wellington and Christchurch, then upon returning to Auckland, established a "commercial art and design" practice in Shortland Street. A split in the Auckland Society of Arts at the September 1911 meeting induced a few members, including Sinel, to resign and form the new Auckland Arts and Crafts Club in May 1912, where he exhibited work at their first annual exhibition held at the Auckland Society of Arts' gallery that year. A surviving presentation drawing depicting his design for a hand-cranked Auckland street directory is thought to be from this period.

Sinel appears to have left Auckland on the SS Maheno for Sydney, Australia, in January 1914, where he took to a life of subsistence as a sheep shearer, harvest-hand and rabbitter. Following the outbreak of World War I, he left Australia for Britain, from Sydney employed as a trimmer on the SS Rimutaka on 5 January 1915, to Liverpool on 8 March 1915. Walking through England and Scotland, he worked as a designer of printed tin box forms for Hudson Scott & Sons of Carlisle, and as a commercial artist for the highly regarded London commercial artists and advertising agencies, Carlton Studios and Charles F. Higham Limited. Higham's clients included Goodrich Tires, His Master's Voice and the British government. Though six of his brothers had enlisted in the Samoa Expeditionary Force and New Zealand Expeditionary Force, Wilfred Sinel DSO attaining the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, his own attempt to enlist in Kitchener's Army was unsuccessful. Instead, he served part of the war as an able seaman in the British Mercantile Marine.

Back in New Zealand and Australia, Sinel worked as an art director and commercial artist mostly on campaigns promoting American products until, on 24 August 1918, he shipped out of Sydney on RMS Niagara for Vancouver, touched at Seattle and, amidst the Spanish influenza pandemic and its precautions, entered the United States at San Francisco. He'd visited San Francisco before.

Harold von Schmidt took him on staff at the advertising firm of Foster & Kleiser, creating posters and billboard advertising then booming to fill any vacant space in town, and working alongside the notable artists and designers von Schmidt, Maynard Dixon, Maurice Del Mue, Roi Partridge, Charles Stafford Duncan, Judson Starr and Otis Shepard. When von Schmidt left Foster & Kleiser, Sinel left too, and along with Maynard Dixon, David Hendrickson, Judson Starr, set up Advertising Illustrators, an independent group producing art for the various San Francisco advertising agencies, including Foster and Kleiser. The group did well for four years.

At some point, Sinel, along with Del Mue, took time-out to explore the Sierra Nevada mountains, where he built a log cabin at Susie Lake, then, as winter closed in, returned to San Francisco and several job offers.