This paper deals with the simultaneous design of a state feedback law and an event-triggering condition ensuring local exponential stability and LQ performance in the presence of plant input saturation and of a communication channel between the controller output and the saturated plant input. To this aim, we adopt Lyapunov-based techniques in a hybrid framework. The design of the event-triggered control is based on two conditions: one to solve the event-triggered control co-design for LQ stabilization; the second one to adjust the co-design among all possible solutions of the first condition thanks to a tunable parameter. The proposed Lyapunov formulation yields an event-triggered algorithm to update the saturated plant input based on conditions involving the closed-loop state, while an estimate of the domain of attraction is provided. Furthermore, a trade-off is highlighted relating the optimality level, the size of the estimate of the basin of attraction and the reduction of the amount of transmissions. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.