About Mike Langone
Two tracks have run simultaneously for twenty-five years. One inside schools and learning platforms. One inside creative studios and manufacturing floors. They've never been separate.
My father ran Langone Studio in Springfield, MA. Commercial photography across four decades. In the earliest years the darkroom was in our basement, where I developed my first film at six years old. By the time I was seven or eight he had moved to a proper studio on Loring Street, where a Langone has run a business continuously since 1915. At its peak the studio had two full-time assistant photographers, a stylist, lab and darkroom staff, and a kitchen built for food styling and food photography. National and international clients. A humming professional operation. I grew up inside it.
The photography came with design tools. My father was on the leading edge of the digital pre-press transition, and I was there for it, learning Photoshop and Illustrator on his Mac Quadra 950 in the early 1990s before I had any professional reason to know them. My first professional role was at Bloom's, a pre-press equipment company in Western Massachusetts. I made demonstration materials showing what the systems could do at their limit. As adoption expanded, post-sales training became mine. I trained Pioneer Packaging's team so well that Frank Carter, their Creative Director, hired me. Learn it, use it, teach it. The pattern was in place before I had a name for it. At Pioneer we replaced a thousand-square-foot stripping room with three people and a workstation. I enrolled at SCAD while at Pioneer and transferred as a Junior, carrying that commercial depth into a place that would take it apart.
SCAD was where the work became mine. Immersion in artists working in every medium, from oil paint to code, cracked open a distinction I hadn't been able to name: the difference between craftwork and artistry. A design professor told me to stop using the shortcuts that worked and let the design speak for itself. I did. It showed.
A year in Indianapolis after SCAD: television production, broadcast graphics, a nationally syndicated wildlife program and Eli Lilly's first long-form pharmaceutical infomercial. Then back east, to Digital Learning Interactive and iLrn. A month in, the Art Director resigned — I took the job before I'd decided I should, and the next three years taught me what I actually knew as the dot com market went from invincible to gone. We raised $22 million, placed the platform in over 400 American colleges, and were acquired by Thomson Learning. Edufusion was the denouement, the last chapter of that era, where I held on until I was one of the last three standing. What stayed with me wasn't the scale. It was the rooms. Sitting across from instructional designers and educational psychologists, learning what a learning taxonomy actually is — not as vocabulary but as a structural principle that determines whether information reaches a learner or slides past them. Those rooms are where the EdTech thinking started.
Ten years at OmniGlow as Creative Director: consumer novelty to medical device, packaging to eCommerce, new product development to patent filing and regulatory compliance. A chemiluminescent heat-detection device for dairy farming became the premise for a 2007 film. The range was the argument. Commercial photography and brand design with my father was always concurrent — not a chapter between things, but a thread running through all of them. Mestek was the culmination of it. My father behind the lens, me directing the frame.
Perpetual Groove has run alongside the rest of the work since 1999. The band started as a Savannah bar act and grew into a national touring institution. Creative direction in everything but formal title: identity, community platform, a 20th anniversary vinyl release. Still ongoing.
A return to schools in 2018, first at UP Education Network and then Veritas Prep Charter School. Two weeks at Veritas became five years: a school technology function built from the ground up and handed off to an internal team. In April 2025 I founded Thinkhole LLC, the formal name for the synthesis of these two tracks.
A consistent thread runs through every chapter: arrive before the transition, become fluent before it's required, then make that fluency accessible to others.
At Bloom's I was making demonstration materials for systems the industry hadn't yet adopted. At Pioneer I was replacing manual processes with digital tools before the industry had fully standardized on them. At iLrn I was building learning management infrastructure before the category had a name. At OmniGlow I built direct-to-consumer eCommerce before my competitors understood the channel. At Veritas, COVID arrived before an LMS was in place. The PowerSchool migration happened at the height of the COVID disruptions, seamlessly, while schools everywhere were scrambling. Schoology followed, timed so the platform was live when Veritas's first physical campus opened.
I like to tell people I was lucky enough to be there. Honestly, I was just old enough to see it happen.
Pre-sales and post-sales have tracked the same arc: make the demonstration, establish the capability, then bring other practitioners up to that capability through training and implementation. A disposition that predates any deliberate strategy for it.
Creative and analytical have always coexisted. While managing Veritas's data compliance, SIS migrations, and PD delivery, I was art directing commercial photography shoots for Mestek. These aren't different modes. They're the same mode applied to different problems.
And none of it was done alone. The vision was mine (the architecture, the direction, the decision about what to build and why), but the execution has always involved people who brought skills, craft, and judgment that sharpened or extended what I brought. I've led teams and worked within them. At iLrn it was a team I helped build from the inside. At OmniGlow it was three designers who owned entire categories alongside me. At Veritas the measure of success was a team that could operate without me — harder than whether they needed me, and more honest.
Based in Springfield, Massachusetts.
Available for remote engagements nationwide.
If you'd like to talk about a problem that doesn't fit neatly into one category, reach out.
Get in touch