STOP! You’re using the Design Space Functions WRONG!!

if you're here you've probably been struggling in design space and I want to help you all today learn how to take all of those design space functions and use them to their best capabilities that way you can create beautiful qriket projects every single time my name is Alicia I am a craft producer here with makers Gonna Learn and I'm going to show you all today all of the favorite tools that we use in design space on a daily basis and how you may be using them but a better way to maybe turn things around give you a fresh perspective in design space and make those projects perfect so that you feel confident every time that you open your Cricut thank you okay so we all know that qriket design space can be very overwhelming there are lots of different features you can see lots of buttons up here on the top lots of buttons along this left side panel and then as always we have these functions in our layers panel so I do not want you all to feel intimidated by this listen I have been there I totally get it so I just want to show you all what I used to do versus what I do now that has really really changed the game for me when it comes to designing in qriket design space so the first feature I want to talk about is grouping versus attaching so a lot of times whenever we go to cut our images we're not really sure if we need to group them together so that they cut together or attach them together now the biggest difference here is that grouping does not affect where your images are placed when you go to make it so let me show you what I mean so I'm got two images here and right now they can freely move around on their own but if I select them both and go up here to our group button when you hover over you can see that that's the group button I'm going to select that now whenever I'm working in my canvas they're together so then when we go to make it they're in the same group here and I can move them around it looks like they're attached well if I want to cut them exactly where they're at on my canvas if I go to make it and they're just grouped they are not going to do that they are going to go onto their own mats and qriket is going to place them on the mat wherever they see that you're not going to be using as much vinyl so it's going to automatically pop them up in this top left corner as you can see here and even if I made them the same color say they were both the same shade of red and I thought oh well that should you know make them cut where they need to go let me show you what happens when we go to make it over here it automatically pops those up to the top left and flushes them as close as they can so that we're not using as much vinyl now this is what you need to be doing if you want to cut these out exactly where they are so I'm going to go ahead and ungroup these so as if we haven't done anything here now I want my heart to cut up here on the top left and I want my star down here in the bottom right well the group function is not going to work for us what will work for us is the attach function so I'm going to go to the bottom of my layers panel and our attach button is right here I'm going to select attach and you'll need to make sure if you're attaching things they're going to cut out of the same color but they're also going to cut out exactly where you want them on the mat so when I go to make it you can see they're in the same exact place which is what we wanted so I really really love this feature it's great for when you're doing one color Cuts if they've got multiple design elements that you want to cut out the same time so if you were doing something like a t-shirt and it had like a words design on it and you just wanted them all the same color but you wanted to add like a heart or a star around the words still going to be all red on a white shirt you could attach everything exactly where it is on your canvas and then when you go to make it on your mat it's all going to be laid out exactly where you need it so you're not having to worry about placing those items exactly where you need them if that makes sense so those are two that I got confused a lot in the beginning and I'm like wait am I supposed to group it or attach it and hopefully this clear things up for you all all right the next one is a big one so last year qriket design space came out with these combined functions one of those being the unite function so typically we were used to using the weld function so the weld was when we wanted to basically weld two shades together we wanted to fuse them into one shape so you can see I've overlapped my star with my heart I'm going to select both layers and I'm going to weld this and show you all what happens so I'm going to select Weld and you can see here it's just one image Even in our layers panel there's no sub layers under that weld result so this is just one inch itself this is permanent the only time I can undo a weld if I immediately do it after I have selected weld so like we just did it and I can go up here and select undo and I can undo it but let me show you all what happens if we do not do that I'm going to weld this together again I'm gonna weld it and then I'm just gonna go I'm Gonna Save this project as Stars and Hearts and then we're just gonna go to my stuff I can kind of browse around yada yada and then I'm like oh I need to go back and work on that Stars and Hearts object let me open it up really quick I'm going to hit customize just open your project back up and I'm like oh I wish those hearts and stars were separated you can't undo it you cannot undo it so this is permanent I cannot undo this my image will permanently look like this forever and that's where the unite function comes in so let me show you the difference here I'm going to go ahead and just pull in a new heart and a new star for us to play around with okay now I'm going to go ahead layer them over one another and then I'm going to select them both we're going to come down here to the combine function and I'm going to select Unite now it looks like the same exact image on my canvas but look over here in my layers panel you can see a star and a heart and what it's allowing me to do is Select that heart and then it's giving me the ability to move this around anywhere on my canvas that I want until I click off of it and there is when it will fuse it again together just in a different portion depending on where you place these shapes so I really really love that aspect of it you can also rotate it resize it if you want to and then when you click off it welts them back together again and also the best part of this unite feature is that it is completely reversible and so if I save my project now just how we did before I'm going to save it and go off of it and come back in and show you what happens so we're going to go back to my stuff kind of click off of it and then we can go back to my projects we're going to open up that Stars and Hearts again this would have the same effect if you exited off of design space and tried to come back in we're going to open this up customize it and you can see here they're still United but if I wanted to undo them I can go to combine down here and hit undo unite and look you all they're separate so they're just back to their own individual images they're their own layer over here in the layers panel so the unite feature has really replaced the well feature for me I don't use the weld function nearly as much now just because I know if I use the unite I'm not in a fully committed relationship with that function and so I really like having the ability to undo anything that I did not want to be permanent so while we're on the topic of the unite function which is one of the new combined features I want to show you all some of the other things that I love about these new combined features and some of the things that I don't typically use as much so when I select both of these shapes you can see down here our combined menu will light up as well as our slice now if I overlap these and select both of the layers and I hit the slice button let me show you what happens so you can see that this little star it was on top of her heart this is acting like a cookie cutter and this heart is like a little piece of dough so the star is right on top of the heart we're hitting slice which is going to push that cookie cutter into the dough and it's going to cut out everything that it overlaps now you can only do this with two layers the slice function will not work if you're using multiple images over two so we can only do the heart and the star if I tried to slice out of more than two images it just will not work it won't allow us to do it but with this last function you can see you're going to have multiple pieces so like I've got this piece I've got this piece right here and then I've got this piece and then you're left with the sliced out image so you kind of get multiple layers when you're using this last result this doesn't bother me as much because I can just go in and delete out any of the layers I don't want over here in my layers panel and it's just super quick if you're doing it a lot but if that's something that you don't like you can use What's called the exclude function let me show you all what happens here I'm going to select both of my images go to combine now I'm deleting all those layers gets on your nerves you can always use one of these new features that they've put in here under the combine menu like subtract so I can hit subtract and you can see here it cuts the star out but I don't have to deal with any of those extra layers because I knew I just wanted this heart with the star cut out of it and I don't have to worry about going through and going to my layers panel and deleting it for me it's not personally a huge deal but there are instances when the subtract function is going to work a lot better than just the slice function now if I were wanting to do multiple cuts out of one image so say we had a big heart and we wanted to add a bunch of stars within it I can place as many of these stars as I want inside of this heart okay so I'm just going to put a whole bunch just so I can show you all truly what happens whenever we use this exclude function so you can see here we have eight images now I want to cut all these stars at one time out of my heart so what I'm going to do is click and drag select everything we're going to go to the combine feature hit exclude and look what happens it cuts them out so good not only that but I still have the ability to move these around resize them rotate them if I wanted to when I click off it's still going to cut it out of my image so this function is really really helpful the only thing that would be a downside to a design similar to this is if for some reason one of these Hearts goes off the edge of your heart whenever you click off of this this little Edge piece right here is still going to hang off of The Edge so anything that you want fitted inside the heart it's going to have to go entirely inside otherwise you're probably just going to stick with using the slice function these combine functions are reversible as well so whenever I select this you can see in the layers panel it says exclude but I can go to combine undo exclude and then all of these are back on their own layer all right so the next function I want to talk about is our offset function this is something I use all of the time I use it to add outlines to my images I use it for print and cut so I can add a cut around my stickers and what this function does is it adds a layer around the image the same shape as the image so it's just like a slight offset of whatever is already existing there so you can see I hit my offset button it's at a 0.25 offset and obviously you can move this around to make it thicker or thinner and then you can use the corners to make them sharp if you wanted to and then hit apply and so a lot of times I would be using my offset for adding an outline around my images well let me show you what I've been using a lot of lately to get an even more precise outline of my image if I'm just needing the outline so I'm not needing all of this right here what I've been liking to do is go into my offset function and then doing an inset just very very small inset you can see it's a negative number up here so a negative 0.153 and I'm going to hit apply and then you can see there's the inset is filling in this star right here now if I just wanted the outline of my shape I can select both of those and I can go to my subtract function and it's just going to leave us with the outline of the star so that's pretty helpful and that way you can do the same thing with the offset but it doesn't give you as precise of a shape if that makes sense because you're going on the outside of the shape so it's going to be a little bit larger proportionally and if this way it's just giving me the true outline of the star if that makes sense so offset great feature inset also a great feature just great in different ways the offset is just going to have a proportionally larger outlined version of the original image okay one of the biggest issues that is talked about in the craft world is kerning our letters so kerning your letters is basically adjusting them either outwardly or inwardly so that they touch each other and look like one solid word so you can see here using this font all of the letters are spaced out now this is a script font so the letters should typically be touching each other now there are a couple different ways you can do this and typically I see people doing the letter spacing manual adjustment up here so whenever you select your text box you can move these in or out depending but like once I get my e touching where I want it to you can see my o is already trying to stick out even my l so if I keep going in it's just not going to look right now you can get the bulk of your spacing done this way but what I typically like to do is make sure to adjust them fairly closely and then I'll go to Advanced and select ungroup to letters so I use the manual spacing to move them in bulk together but then I can go to ungrouped letters and get a really really fine tune movement on these letters so that they can get really close without overlapping so you can see now I can select these individual letters and I'm just bumping them over using the arrow pad on my keypad and so I'm not having to move them a ton and they're still going to stay in line and it's not going to take me a thousand years to get my letters current exactly how I want them now I will say if you do Advance if you do ungroup to letters that they are still going to say the hatch from each other unless you select them all and then attach them that way um but you need to remember if you're attaching all the stuff together it's going to try to cut your letters individually you can see there's little black lines and I can change the color of this you all can really get a good view but anywhere there's a black line the letters going to cut so once you've got them current exactly how you want them really you're going to want to do combine and you not so make sure you're not attaching those letters but rather uniting them so they're one solid image and you can see the black lines completely disappear and this is going to cut out of our vinyl as one solid unit I'd also like to say before you do not those that you are making sure to edit any spelling make sure that the word is exactly what you want it to be mainly because you cannot go back and edit it after it's United the unite basically turns it into an image so even though it's a word it's technically an image now and so it's ready to be cut and it's not going to allow you to edit it so make sure sure you've got your word exactly spilled how it should be and that you don't plan on changing it before you go to cut it a cool feature that design space has is the writing text feature so I want to show you all how stinking cool this is I'm going to change this to a sketch font now if you've never heard of a sketch font we offer these with our membership um they we have lots of different options here as you can see I don't even think this is all of them I haven't downloaded them all but I wanted to show you how this works so I'm going to go ahead and select this artsy Amy sketch font let's blow this up really big and you all can see they're very thin so it doesn't look like something I could cut because if I tried to cut this out of adhesive vinyl or heat transfer vinyl it's not going to cut well because it's going to be so thin and so in return what we're going to need to do is change this into a pin function so you can see here we've got draw and then beneath it we have all these options well I wanted to select the pin function and what this is going to do is actually draw this image on a piece of cardstock for example or whatever you decide you're wanting to ride on and so whenever you run this through your Cricut you actually put a pin or a Cricut marker into your Cricut Machine and it will write out your letters now you could technically do this with a standard font but what happens whenever we do that let me show you guys with a different font it's going to do the outline of this font but you can see that marker is going to go all the way around it and it's going to get really really thick and it's not going to look good it's going to start smudging and the letters are going to start blending together especially if you're writing something super small which typically you are a lot of people use this sketch fonts for filling in cards and things like that so small handwritten items and if you're using a regular font to do this it's just simply not going to work there are workarounds we have a video actually going over how to fill in bold text like this but it is not the same as using a sketch font so sketch fonts are really really the go-to if you're wanting to use your Cricut to write handwritten items for your projects if y'all are interested in your text I will link a video below for you all to watch and Lauren walks you all through how to fill in bold text like this um now that below if you're interested now say that you wanted to attach a word to a shape so I want to type lovely on a heart I'm going to go ahead and pull this heart in we'll change the color okay I'm going to send it to the back and then I'm gonna resize my word so I really want to write lovely on my heart okay let's say that you want to add a word to your heart so I already have my heart shape pulled in I'm wanting to cut this out of cardstock but I would love to write a note to someone on the heart so you can go pull up a text box let's just start with the word lovely and then I'm going to pick a sketch font like we just previously talked about and we're going to use a script you can resize it here okay but we need to make sure whenever we're pulling a new text box in that we're using this operations menu to our best ability so right now it's going to try to cut lovely out of the heart but I want to change that so that it draws the lovely on top of the heart rather than cutting it but I don't need to change the function of the heart that still needs to be a basic cut and so after I do that I want to attach everything together and so whenever I go to cut this on my Cricut that's going to allow us to actually cut this heart out and write the lovely on the heart rather than cutting it out the last thing I want to talk about is removing the background from pngs so I'm just going to upload a photo this is great when we're doing print and cut images and I'm just going to take a little picture of Lauren's Asher and we can remove the background automatically if you've got qriket access or if you don't you're still going to have this option to use a manual selection tool so you can see there's still parts of this image that need to be erased so we're going to zoom all the way in and you can manually go in here and select parts of the image that you do not want so if it's a similar color it's going to take out the bulk of it just by selecting remove so don't forget that you've got that option especially if you're not an access member you still have the opportunity to actually erase the background but that manual one is going to be super helpful in getting the bulk of the background removed and then you can go in just with a standard erase tool and you can go in and get fine tune all of these little tiny pieces that you may not want in there another thing that's nice to do if you want to check your image is go to preview cut image and so whenever we do this you can see down here in this bottom left corner that we've still got a ton of area that needs to be removed and so this allows us to really see what we're doing and making sure that we're getting a clean cut and erasing anything we don't need and then you can go undo the hide cut image and you can see what is left I hope you all were able to take even a little bit of Knowledge from today's video I feel like when I first started Cricket I was so overwhelmed with all these functions but now that I'm using my Cricut daily it's allowed me to really navigate design space much better and I feel like I'm using my tools to their best capability and so I don't feel limited by Design space but rather encouraged by it so if you all love this video make sure to hit the Subscribe button and the Little Bell on the bottom so you're notified every time that we post new crafty videos If you like this video and you're like man I would love to learn more about my Cricut make sure to click the link below about joining our membership we would love to have you all as a part of our community we are constantly educating motivating and inspiring you all to create the best crafts you possibly can we offer tons of courses files and fonts within our membership and we would love for you all to be a part of our community and if you like this video make sure to watch this one over here I think you'll like it just as much bye

Channel: Makers Gonna Learn

Views: 25,580

Keywords: Cricut, DIY Cricut Maker, Cricut crafts, Cricut Tutorials, How to use my cricut maker, Cricut Maker tutorials, Cricut Easy Press, cricut design space, design space tutorials, how to use my die cutting machine, Cricut Beginner, Cricut Hacks, Cricut Tips

Id: dpeKytUT_74

Length: 24min 50sec (1490 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 19 2023