Mike Winston: Designer, food enthusiast and Rube Goldberg machine fanatic hails from Holmdel, NJ - a stone’s throw away from the Jersey shore. Mike decided at a young age to forgo the standard GTL tendencies of his peers for pursuits of a different nature. Early on, Mike developed an interest in contraptions, puzzles, how things work, taking things apart, and constructing. He eventually traded in his K’Nex for a computer and began tinkering with Macromedia Flash (now Adobe) and created a fighting stick figure animation strongly influenced by the Xiao Xiao animation series and The Matrix.
The design-freak floodgates had been opened. From there, Mike sought all creative software he could get his hands on. Since then, he’s become part of a small but strong international community of media player interface designers and coders called The Skin Consortium. The group works collaboratively to produce high quality Winamp and Xion Media Player interfaces and push the bounds of what is possible on the platforms. It was around this time that Mike began freelancing using the web handle WinstonGFX and discovered bourbon.
Mike Winston pursued a degree in Fine Arts with a concentration in Graphic Design from The University of Pennsylvania. During this time he worked as an intern in MTV’s On-Air Design Department and later at Showtime in their Digital Design department where he mastered a variety of tasks including buying mannequin heads for his bosses and creating some totally badass design work for program interstitials and online content for Dexter, Weeds, and Nurse Jackie. He also fueled his Rube Goldberg machine obsession with stop-motion animation by creating his own, which involved hanging toast from his frat house ceiling.
Currently, Mike's creating totally awesome things for The Internets at digital advertising agency, The Barbarian Group. Although Mike's usually busy cranking out work that's so hot it will melt your face off for clients like Samsung, Quaker, GE, and Pepsi, he makes time to take no prisoners as part of the agency's ping-pong, bowling, and kickball teams.
When he’s not busting his eardrums rocking out to Metal or making lists of the lists he needs to make, Mike can be found, camera in hand, eating his way across New York City. Like nearly everything he loves to do, Mike takes his passion for food to a completely ridiculous level, photographing every dish at every meal and sharing it with his followers on the social network Foodspotting.
If you’d like to learn more about Mike, grab a meal with him, or hire him so that he can eat even more, you can find him at any of the following places around the internet:
