Cricut Design Studio: Useful Features and Tips by Nancy White

    The Cricut Design Studio is a software developed to connect your Cricut cutter to your computer, significantly increasing your options with any cartridge.

    With this software your Cricut becomes nearly as versatile as the Wishblade and the Pazzles. It allows you to weld, twist, combine, resize and reshape your designs, with a much smaller learning curve than that of the bigger systems.

    The most popular feature is the welding option, which allows you to link letters together to make professional titles. You no longer have to scrape off and glue individual little letters each time you want to make words!

    Some other useful features of the Cricut Design Studio are the abilities to:

• See exactly what you're cutting on a grid
• Pre-plan your cuts, saving paper and time
• Change size, slant and angle of your designs
• Place one object inside another or weld them together to design a verse that's all one single piece of paper
• Cut only certain parts of a design
• Save your projects to re-use your designs whenever you want
• Share and swap files with other users

Useful Design Studio Tips

    Make it portable: if you go to scrapbooking retreats or craft fairs, consider loading the program onto a laptop so you can take it with you on scrapbooking retreats and craft fairs.

    Layered projects made easy: you no longer have to run the mat through multiple times for a layered project. With the Cricut Design Studio you have the ability to lay multiple papers on the mat and run it through just once (by using the grid as you set up your project).

What you should know before you buy

    There's one thing that's been causing confusion among users: with the Cricut Design Studio you can explore and preview all the cartridges in Provo Craft libraries, and even make designs using them. But you can only cut characters from the cartridges you own. So you still have to buy the cartridges before you can cut.

Unlock the full potential of your Cricut

    The Design Studio is pretty straightforward and a lot easier to use than those other software based cutters. Of course it's not perfect and you find bugs at times, but updates and and 'fix' downloads are released frequently.

    From my experience, I know it helped my Cricut change from being an occasionally used system to something that I use on most of my cards and on a great number of layouts. All things considered, I think this should be the second thing you buy, right after the Cricut!