This paper is concerned with event-triggered sampled-data consensus for distributed multi-agent systems with directed graph. A novel distributed event-triggered sampled-data transmission strategy is proposed, which allows the event-triggering condition to be intermittently examined at constant sampling instants. Based on this novel strategy, a sampled-data consensus control protocol is presented, with which the consensus of distributed multi-agent systems can be transformed into the stability of a system with a time-varying delay. Then, a sufficient condition on the consensus of the multi-agent system is derived. Correspondingly, a co-design algorithm for obtaining both the parameters of the distributed event-triggered transmission strategy and the consensus controller gain is proposed. Two numerical examples are given to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.