Meet Elijah Crafter 🎨

Elijah Crafter is a transgender professional graphic designer with a double degree in psychology, women’s gender and sexuality studies, and proficiency in Adobe Suite. As a self-taught artist, he creates and expresses himself through hidden messages in his traditional artworks that represent his culture and creative spirit. 

Whether it is weaving black history in his items or creating a fully deconstructable paper grenade just for fun, Elijah is an amazing creative who is always challenging and improving himself.

Want to see Elijah’s art for yourself? Show support and check out Elijah’s Craft Store etsy shop. 

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Video Transcript

‍Introduction 👋

My name is Elijah crafter. My pronouns are he/him/his. I would consider myself a junior graphic designer and I have actually been doing graphic design since middle school maybe. But I've only been doing it professionally for the past two years. 

Familiar But New ⭐

I couldn't get a job in my field and since I've been doing graphic design for myself for so long, I decided to give it a try with my sister-in-law who was starting a business. And then quickly when she was giving me these different assignments and tasks, I realized I really didn't know what I was doing and I really needed guidance and help. 

InCreative Journey 🚶

Along the way, she introduced me to Yelle Belle with Creative Co. and then from there, I was able to be introduced to so many different people, so many creative people who just guided me and helped challenge me and I've learned so much. I was taking on a little bit more than I could chew. I had gotten so used to challenging myself with something new and whatever I didn't know I would just learn how from YouTube and just go to the next thing just challenging myself and challenging myself. But what I didn't do was evaluate, “what are my limitations?” and focus on my strengths. So what I ended up doing was I ended up just taking a fail on a really important project with this company that I had a contract with. 

It has definitely taught me so much being able to look at what happened, what I did wrong, now I'm better for it. So I started a project with Yelle with Lipstick Biddies. What I had to do was work with her creating brand guidelines that included the logo and three different forms and then I had to do like the different fonts, the elements and everything that goes into the brand. And it was really fun. It taught me a lot and actually I was able to take what I learned under the guidance of Yelle and actually do my own, for my own personal private life later on. 

I think that what Creative Co. does that is unique, is that although we are a community of Creatives, we are a community of individuals with feelings, with struggles, with so many different things going on. And what Creative Co. does is it creates a space where you can be yourself, you can reach out and ask questions about things that you may not feel comfortable asking and other settings like it really allows people to be I don't want to say imperfect, but perfectly imperfect. It's just really really good community for those who need that support, and who may often shy away from getting that support from other professionals.

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Credits: Kassandra Jones

Collaborating on this series with "The Co" has given me new found inspiration and confidence by allowing me to have the creative freedom to tell the stories of so many wonderfully talented individuals. It has been an honor to work with them!