Hello and welcome to Craft with Sarah and this brand new Design Space tutorial.
Towards the end of last year, Cricut released an amazing update to Design Space which introduced
lots of new features. These are so good if you like to design your own projects in Design
Space as there's now loads more options for doing your own creative designs and
it's a lot easier now than it ever was to create bespoke designs to cut with your Cricut machine.
In this video, I'm going to be taking a deep dive at all of those new features including:
where to find them, how to use them and when they will be useful.
We'll also have a look at some old favorites such as Slice and Weld as they're a little bit
different now, or in a different place, or just there's something there to talk about as there
often is when there's a Design Space update. Without any further ado, let's jump straight
into Design Space! We'll start with some of the old favorites.
I've made a circle and a heart on here and they're both separate layers as you
can see in the layers panel. If I want to make an additional copy of this circle,
I can click on it and then press Duplicate over on the top and that will make a copy.
I can then change the color in here to whatever I want.
I can click it resize it by clicking those arrows and rotate it, although
because it's a circle that's not going to be very obvious with the little rotate button
there. It probably would have made more sense to show you the rotate on the heart like that.
You'll notice I just got rid of that circle. To do that, I hit the delete key on my keyboard but
if I undo that (press undo up here) to bring it back, another way to do it is
by clicking that layer and then clicking the little Trash Can icon over in the top right.
If I wanted to resize this picture together, so resize them in the same proportion,
I could group these layers. To do that, either drag a box around them to select them both and
you can see that this box is around both of them. Another way to do it, because we've only
got these two things on the canvas, is to press Select All, which again selects both of them.
Finally, the third way to do it is to click one of them in the layers panel press shift
on your keyboard and choose the other one. So that's three different ways you can
select multiple layers at the same time. Now that I've got them both selected,
I can group them by pressing this button at the top. Now when I click away and click back,
I don't have to select both those layers again because they're grouped. They both get selected
together and then I can resize them and they both change exactly the same time.
Let's make these big again. To separate them out, click that same button only this time it says
Ungroup. Now I can move them about separately again and they're no longer grouped together.
Let's say I wanted to cut this heart out of the middle of my circle. First, I put it exactly
in the middle by pressing Select All and going Align and then Center. It doesn't look like it's
centered just because it's got the big gap there and then with the point, but it is in the middle.
With those layers selected, go down the bottom and press Slice.
Now that cuts it out like a cookie so we've now got these separate pieces.
I'm gonna undo to put them together put them back to how it works now.
The newest version of Design Space has several additional features to play about with the layers.
Previously, you had the Weld button for if you wanted to join these shapes into one layer. That
does still exist, so let's select both of these, go into Combine which is new and then press Weld.
So this is the Weld that's always been in Design Space. Look what happens to the layers panel
when I press this. It's joined my two shapes together so now they are combined into one.
One the drawbacks of this is that once you've Welded, unless you undo it straight away,
that change is permanent. So if I Welded my layers, closed Design Space and opened it
up again another day and I wanted to separate them out again, I wouldn't be able to do that.
Design Space have introduced new features so that you CAN make layers go together without
it being permanent. Let's take a look at the other options under that Combine menu.
So I'll select these again, go into Combine and this time I'll press Unite.
You see the little picture does look very similar to Weld. So I click there and then
as far as my design on the page looks, it looks like it's done exactly the same thing.
They've both been Combined into one. However, when you look in the layers panel this is where
you can see that it is actually still two separate layers so even though it looks like it's joined
over here I can still select one of the layers in the layers panel and move it about and then when
you let go with the mouse it joins them together again. This is really, really great because it
means you can move things about if you didn't quite get it positioned right the first time,
whereas previously you would have had to Weld your layers and then if it didn't look right you would
have had to unweld it, move them about, Weld it again and hope that looked right - and if not,
then undo, move it about, weld it again. That's all gone now with this new Unite button,
so it just gives you lots more flexibility and as soon as you let go with the mouse, it unites them
again and when this is cut out with a Cricut it would just cut around the outside of the shape.
If you want to separate them at any point, click on it, go into Combine and then Undo Unite. One
thing to bear in mind is that if you undo the unite, it does keep everything the same color
so you don't retain your original colors which is why this hasn't gone back to red but now
you can see they're two completely separate shapes again which you know because you've
got the cut line the border around that heart. Let's change this back to red to move on to the
next thing. I'll select those again and then under Combine, this time I'm going to press Subtract.
All of these four things: unite, subtract, intersect and exclude, they work in a very similar
way but they keep different parts of the design. This time I'll press Subtract. What this has done
is it's taken my heart out of the circle. It works similar to the Slice feature that
I showed earlier in this video, however with Subtract you don't get the slice results left
behind that you then have to delete and also it is less permanent than Slice.
If you sliced something out and didn't like how it looked you'd have to undo your slice
using the undo button up here and then move your layers about, re-slice it and hope that
was what you wanted, whereas with Subtract you can click on the layers in the layers panel,
move them about and then when you let go with the mouse it does that Subtract again.
So just like how the first option was kind of the improved version of Weld, the
Subtract is like the improved version of Slice. To undo it, just click it go into Combine and Undo
Subtract and now our layers are separate again but remember you do lose that original color.
Let’s take a look at the next one. I'll select both of these, go into Combine and then Intersect.
This has kept the shape where both my circle and my heart were overlapping. If I undo this
again to make it a little bit easier to see, let's duplicate these, just put them over here.
So this is the original; I'll select these and go Combine > Intersect and you see that's just kept
this little bit where the heart and the circle overlap. I can move things about a little bit
more, so if I do all of that we get a lot more of the heart because it's now overlapping a lot more.
Similarly, if I move it all the way over here and let go, we're only going to see
that tiny little shape because that's the only bit where the two shapes are touching.
So let's click that one and Undo Intersect. We've got one left now which is Exclude. I’ll
select both of these, go into Combine and press Exclude.
This time, what it's done is it's got rid of everything that's overlapping, so it's sort
of the opposite of the Intersect. Again, we can move things about,
so these bits where it's both overlapping it's got rid of that. I wonder what happens if I move
it entirely in there? Then we get kind of the same effect as with the Subtract or the Slice.
I'm just going to move it about a little bit more. So you see that is what that one is doing,
and again we can click Combine and Undo Exclude to get our layers separated again.
Sometimes when you're working with these new features, you may want to actually make these
changes permanent if you know that you're not going to need to move it again and you want to
then do other changes to those layers for example Contouring or just changing any part of it,
you know, that's different to that Union or Exclude or whatever it is that you've set.
Then you need to actually tell Design Space to make these changes permanent.
Let's select both of these and go into Combine and Unite to join them together.
We can make this permanent by going into Combine and then Merge Layers.
So at the moment, you see you've got both of the layers still in the layers panel. If
I click Merge Layers, this basically is the same as Weld so it moves it into one layer and now if
I was to save this, close Design Space and open it again, I wouldn't be able to unmerge these.
So only do a merge if you're absolutely sure you're never
going to need to separate these out or to move them around again.
Before you merge them, the other tools along the bottom here: Attach, Flatten and Contour
have always been present in Design Space for at least as long as I've been using it, so these
are not new and they still work exactly the same way but let's just have a little quick overview
of them just in case you haven't seen them before. I’ll delete this one here, move this one back over
and make it bigger so you can see. Attach tells the Cricut that we want to cut layers (or score
them, or draw them) in a particular position. For example, if I was to select these and click Attach
it changes everything to the same color and it's now got this to say it's Attached.
However, this is still two separate shapes which you know because we have that line
around the heart so when you go to cut this out with the Cricut, if I click Make It,
it's still going to do this line. So you generally probably wouldn't use it
for things that are overlapping like this because it's still going to cut it into different places.
However, what it can be super helpful with is that if your pieces are all separated on the screen and
you want to keep the positioning – let’s make a little star here and then just do a few copies
and then put those over there, drag a box around everything,
go into Arrange – nope, Align - and I will go Align Top to put them all so that they line
up and then Align > Distribute Horizontally and I've now got a nice row of evenly spaced stars.
I need to make them a little bit smaller otherwise they'll be too big for my Cricut mat. Let's say
I wanted to cut this from vinyl and I wanted to keep the exact positioning of these stars.
If I was just to make it, it forgets the positioning. You see how they're now all
kind of touching and you can move them about and get it all messed up. Attach stops that from
happening. So I'll select everything and press Attach and now when I go to click Make It, it's
kept my exact positioning and I can't move any of those individual Stars away from the other ones.
Attach is also what you need to use if you're doing a score line
or drawing with the pen tool or using the foil tool on anything like that. As
a super-duper quick demonstration of that, let's go into Shapes and
choose a rectangle. Let's say we wanted to make a five by seven inch greetings card.
I'll make my width 10 inches, so double five, and the height will be seven. Oh,
nope, I forgot to click the padlock to untick it (unlock it). There we go. If I wanted to add a
score line down the middle, to make this easier to fold, I'd go into Shapes and choose a score line,
set it to the height of my card which is seven inches, press Select All, Align and Center.
However, if I click Make It, you see it's going to do my score line on a random bit of card,
not in the middle of my actual greetings card.
Again, this is where you need Attach. If I select both of those, go to Attach,
and now when I click Make It, it's got the line down the middle exactly where I want it to go.
Next we have Flatten. Flatten is only needed if you want to do a print then cut which is where
you print a design on your home printer and then the Cricut would cut around the edge. For example,
on this wreath design, you can see at the moment it's lots of different layers because
it's designed to be cut from cardstock or vinyl and then layered up together but if
you wanted to print it on your home printer, click the design and now I'll press Flatten.
Watch what happens: it merges it all into one layer, you lose all the little black
cut lines around the edges and now this is just one piece which you could send to your
printer. I'm getting a little error at the moment because this is too big for the print and cut.
If I make it smaller than that, the warning disappears. You can Unflatten by clicking the
design and then pressing Unflatten and that will bring all your layers back.
Finally, we have the Contour button on the very right hand side. Contour lets you fill
in gaps in a design. For this turkey, let's click on it and then press Contour
and it gives you a little pop-up where you can see all of the cut lines.
You can click into the little spaces, you see they kind of go a little bit darker on the outline as I
hover and then as you click it fills in those cut lines - oops - I just clicked the same one twice.
It can be a bit fiddly to get the exact thing. It's doing a little preview of it underneath
and if I close that you see I've now filled this in.
This is really helpful for when you're creating your own designs in Design Space,
particularly paper craft projects because it means if you end up with any teeny tiny gaps
in your design that the Cricut might struggle to cut, you can fill them in with Contour.
You can also use Contour to make layered designs and there is just so many things you can do with
it. I love the Contour feature! So there we go, that was a quick
overview of the key tools in Cricut Design Space and how to use them.
I hope you enjoyed this video on how to use the new Design Space features. If you did, please give
the video a thumbs up and subscribe to my YouTube channel for loads more Design Space tutorials and
Cricut crafts and of course, free svgs. Thank you for watching, bye!