It starts with a grandmother, a farm, and a steady forward gaze.

Tolliefy

My grandmother Tolliefy was born in 1920, back when people didn't have the luxury of falling apart. The Great Depression wasn't something you read about in a textbook — it was the air you breathed, the way you learned to stretch a dollar, fix what you had, and keep moving whether life felt fair or not.

That's the kind of woman she was.

She ran a 20-acre farm in rural Vancouver, Washington, the way her generation did: with steady hands, early mornings, and zero drama about it. She raised Black Angus cattle. She kept a garden. She tended fruit trees. She cooked from scratch, every day, because that's what you did when you were feeding a family and living off the land.

She was a skilled seamstress, making and mending our clothes with the same care she put into everything else. Nothing went to waste. You used what you had, you worked for what you needed, and you didn't expect applause for doing the right thing.

After my parents divorced, she helped raise my brother and me on that farm. And I don't mean "visited sometimes." I mean she showed up — in the daily grind, in the meals, in the responsibility, in the quiet stability kids don't realize they're being given until they're older. The farm was our world. It was simple, and it was hard, and it was full of life.

When she passed away in 1990, I was ten years old. After that, our family began associating her memory with sunflowers. Somewhere along the way, we also carried a piece of family folklore: that her name, Tolliefy, meant sunflower in Cherokee. I haven't been able to confirm that translation, but the symbolism has always fit her so perfectly that it almost doesn't matter.

Because my grandmother had this way about her — a quiet strength that never begged life to be easier.

The Early Start

Growing up, we had a computer when some other kids didn't because my dad was a computer programmer. We had a dot matrix printer at home. I remember "painting" detailed pictures, choosing each large pixel color in Paint. In school, my favorite subject was art.

In high school, I created digital art on a brand new 1998 iMac G3 (Bondi Blue) in the art room with Adobe Photoshop 5.0 and Adobe Illustrator 7.0, learning to draw vectors with the Bézier pen tool. I was also on the yearbook staff my senior year, helping with layout and drawings.

So when my family pooled together to help me get into college, what I wanted to study was not even a second thought for me: graphic design.

The Name

So when it came time to name my design brand, I chose Xirasol Creative — xirasol being the Galician word for sunflower. It wasn't chosen because it was trendy or "cute." It was chosen because it carries a legacy.

Even the sunflower in my logo reflects that: it's turned slightly, tilted upward — reaching toward the light.

Xirasol Creative is my tribute to the woman who taught me, by the way she lived, what real strength looks like: hard work, faithfulness in the small things, and a steady forward gaze.

This brand exists to build, create, and serve with that same spirit.