Instead of lovely Los Angeles skies, we will be saying hello to a beautiful San Diego skyline tomorrow. If you’re in the neighborhood, we’d love for you to come by and check out our talk at UC San Diego, Angie’s alma mater.

The unforgettable UCSD library. Photo by SD Dirk.

We’re giving talk to about 300 students enrolled in the Introduction to Communication and Culture class. We’ll be sharing our journey from being an upstart start-up (pun intended) to the indie brand people know and hopefully love, with more than a few anecdotes thrown in.

While preparing for a talk, we came upon this pictures from our very first art show. Can you see the love?

You can see more shots from that epic night here.

We’re super excited to be there tomorrow and Angie hasn’t even seen her campus since she graduated. We’ll be giving the talk to a class of Communications majors, the same program Angie finished.

Our talk is tomorrow (May 26) at 12:30 pm at Room 108, Peterson Hall, Thurgood Marshall College. Here’s a map

If you do decide to stop by (yay!), get a parking ticket at the machine in the Extension lot (first lot on Muir College Drive (near the Torrey Pines North turn-in).

We’re like proud parents around here lately. Why? If you haven’t logged onto Facebook recently (who are those people, we wonder?) we’ve added a new widget on our sidebar.

Presenting…. the Poketo mini-shop on Facebook! Swing by and have a look around (maybe get a little something to celebrate the weekend too) and do tell us what you think:

I was so happy to hear that Spike Jonze teamed up with yet another company, Absolut, to create a 30-minute robot love story that was featured at Sundance 2010. Titled, I’m Here, the short film–or really really long advertisement, doesn’t feature any blatant plugs of the vodka, but like any other ad that’s out there, it’s suggestive. The movie’s trailer seems pretty cute. But when you get down to it, it’s an advertisement for alcohol, and tells us that by consuming Abolut, we too can have “out-of-the-ordinary” experiences.

True that.

Remember this hilarious IKEA commercial he did back in the day?

And my favorite, the mini music vid he did for Lakai. Pretty much the only thing I’ve seen out there that’s made me so moved by the actual sport of skateboarding. So beautiful.

Love that “Lone Ranger” touch he does at the end as the skateboarder rides into the sunset.

While going through my twitter feeds(@poketo), I saw a tweet from Slate Magazine that said “Surprisingly entertaining animated video about a Scottish sweater company” so I clicked on the link.

It was an animation by the famed Scottish artist, David Shrigley commissioned by a company called Pringle of Scotland. Frankly, I didn’t know anything about this company before seeing the video but I soon found out a lot and I’ll tell you why and how shortly.

The drawing by David Shrigley is so fun and charming, the animation, and music, perfect. The tone of the narration is so funny and light. I laughed out loud multiple times during the animation.

After the watching the video, I needed to find out more about the company, Pringle of Scotland. It wasn’t a simple sweater company as the video hilariously portrayed. It was a really high-end fashion label from Scotland. Their site features a section called ” Ad Film” where you can see Ryan McGinley’s film featuring the artiest of actresses of all, Tilda Swinton. It’s actually a really beautiful film. It brought back memories from 2 years ago when we went to Glasgow to launch the Poketo Glasgow Series.

How smart is their marketing? Commissioning David Shrigley to do a funny and quirky animation in time for the Milan Fashion show is so unexpected. I really admire their vision and confidence in their brand to know that they can produce, on one hand a total avant-garde poetry of a film with Tilda Swinton, and on the other an antithesis to what they’re really about, almost a satirical portrayal of the snootiness of the fashion brand that they are. They are so confident in their brand that they can just have fun with it.

Oh and their clothes… ABSOLUTELY BREATHTAKING!
Next time I’m at Barneys or Neiman Marcus, I’m so dropping major dough on one of those beautiful coats…
uhm…j/k