I'm Judson Cowan, and I have a short attention span

For some people, that's a bug. For a solo board game designer, it's a feature. I like getting my hands into as many pies as possible and have always sought new ways to express my creativity. Whether it's composing for video games, illustrating for publications, producing my own posters, or designing board games - I need a lot of outlets for the endless stream of demons swirling around in my head. And the world of board games has no shortage of different things I can bounce between to keep my mind occupied.

I've been a big gamer all my life and when I waded into the world of game design, I was thrilled with how many facets were involved in the role and how many hats I get to wear in the process of designing, developing, producing and marketing my games. Imagine you found a job that required a dozen skills working in concert – and you're already good at all of them. It's like discovering you're good at digging and immediately striking gold. You can learn more about how I got into board game design and how it aligned with my skills in this talk.

Before I stepped foot in this world, I spent a few decades working in advertising as a designer and eventually creative director. You remember Conan O'Brien? I designed his blimp. I spent a long time in-house as a creative director and manager, collaborating with dozens of agencies.

At the same time, I was moonlighting as a musician and illustrator. I did music for Cartoon Network, Penny Arcade, and most recently Rogue Legacy 2. I still fire up the old Ableton Live from time to time, if only to write jingles for my games. I also did a wildly popular poster of the game Dark Souls, which made a huge splash on Reddit and is now officially licensed and still selling well to this day. Then I did a SECOND wildly popular map of Dark Souls for Tune & Fairweather's Abyssal Archive release.

Beyond my career, I'm a huge gamer (video, board, TT) and a huge horror fan - which you might have guessed from the games I make. You can hear me talk endlessly about the design of horror film posters right here.

About Tettix Games

As a company, there are a few key tenets that underline everything I make.

1. Beauty and fun in equal measure. Many designers begin with either mechanics or theme, but I like to begin with the experience I'm trying to provide and build the theme and mechanics simultaneously to drive that experience. I think all games deserve to be beautiful AND fun and I think often they tend to skew one way or the other. I want to make them both.
2. No waste and no redundant parts. I will never produce unnecessary things like neoprene mats, big-box storage solutions, card sleeves, or premium versions of existing components. Anything that would make an existing component redundant and create waste goes against company policy. My aim is to avoid manufacturing things that are destined for the landfill. The industry has slowly tried to convince gamers that they need things they did fine without two decades ago, and that movement is driven solely by the capitalistic desire to increase profits, without any consideration of the environment.  Because plastic card sleeves stand firmly against this policy, I will also never specifically design my game boxes to have space for sleeved cards.
3. Considerate to the planet we depend on. In addition to avoiding unnecessary parts, I will always strive to minimise the impact my games have on the environment by using biodegradable components wherever possible. No plastics – only wood, paper and metal components. (Note that Hideous Abomination was designed before this company was established with operating principals, thus it contains plastics.)
4. Accessible, inclusive and affordable. I'm aiming to make games that are accessible to as wide an audience as possible. My hope is that anyone can afford Tettix games and that players of all abilities are able to play them. That means keeping costs down, keeping accessibility in mind, and ensuring artwork and themes are representative of the broad range of human beings on earth.

What's the name about?

Tettix is ancient greek for "cicada", those noisy insects that howl in the summer. I always loved them growing up and when I originally formed my band, I took the name Cicada. But some other Cicada band beat me to fame, so I changed it to Tettix because it's enigmatic, brief, and kind of sounds like Tetris. So when I started a games company, I just kept the same branding. It's all from the same mind, after all.