Who are you, and what do you do?
My name is Ryan Troy Ford, and I'm an artist, designer, and screenprinter. By day I'm a freelance designer, working on everything from brand identities to motion graphics. By night I'm an illustrator, painter, half-assed musician, and I run a screenprinting shop with two of my best friends called Ghost Press.
For the record, I had to start using my middle name because there's another designer named Ryan Ford who's a lot more successful than I am.
What hardware do you use?
Pencil, pen, and paint for the most part. I love those Staedler Pigment Liners, Sharpie oil-based paint markers, and any paper with a good tooth, or any found object with a decently flat surface that can be sanded down for a canvas.
I've found a lot of meditative comfort in analog practices, though that's not to say I shun assistance from a computer when it's needed. For that, I have a 15" MacBook Pro, Wacom Intuos5, and Epson Perfection V19 scanner.
And what software?
With things that can't be done by hand, After Effects is my shit, but I also keep a close relationship with Photoshop, Illustrator, and Cinema 4D. I run my personal site using Jekyll and host it on GitHub, and for that I'm using Sublime Text and the command line. You should've seen me fumble my way through Git, Ruby, and XCode to get that shit running. Imagine trying to teach a drunk dog to play Settlers of Catan.
What would be your dream setup?
A decently large, open studio with a lot of light, several dogs, fast internet, good record collection, and a garden outside. Preferably just outside of a city, perhaps in the Blue Ridge Mountains or Pacific Northwest somewhere. Big enough to be used as a community space for teaching workshops, hosting events, and fostering activism, but small enough so I don't feel the need to fill it with bullshit.