Do You Speak Cricut? - Cricut Design Studio

Welcome to this week’s edition of Do You Speak Cricut? Every Saturday will feature a different Cricut cartridge review from one of the Made Especially For You design team members. This feature was added to the blog in order to give potential cartridge buyers a better idea of what each cart has to offer. Click here to view last week's April Showers cartridge review. 

This week let’s talk about the Cricut Design Studio (CDS). I have the software, but if you like you can download a free trial here http://www.cricut.com/cds/. In using CDS, you have an on-screen cutting mat to create electronically. You can preview all your cuts for size, position, content, etc. You can use multiple Cricut carts on the same project.

Cricut Design Studio retails for $65.00 usd on Walmart.com. It is $29.99 on Overstock.com.

If you are an avid Cricut user this software can be very helpful. If you do not use your Cricut but here and there, this software is not for you. Here are some screen shots of the common things that CDS can be used to do.

Here is a main screen shot:

--You can see the cutting mat that your machine uses.

--You can see the Library List of all Cricut Cartridges available. You can only cut with cartridges that you physically own.

--You can see the quick tool bar on the left with New, Copy, Paste, Delete, Preview, Cut.

Here is a shot with the Features menu dropped down.

--You can choose all the Features of the cartridge from here.

Here is a screen shot of choosing Kate’s ABCs cartridge and the rabbit at 4 3/4"

Here is a screen shot where the rabbit has been choosen 2x and the image flipped. The image is also welded together. This way the Cricut will cut the two rabbits together as 1 piece.

Here the rabbits have been separated and the cart has been changed to Don Juan. The Happy is at 2”. The Weld function is on so this will cut as 1 piece.

Here is a screen shot where you are on the same file, but have changed mats. You will need some layers for this project. Here you can lay them out. When you are on differing mats, it will only cut what is on that screen.You can cut and copy items from 1 mat to another.

You can also the Preferences drop down menu. Here is where you can choose to cut the same image multiple times. Differing papers causes you to want to cut more than 1x. Without loading and re-loading you can choose to re-cut the same image up to 4x. This is a very handy feature.

I hope that this view of the CDS helps you to decide to buy or not to buy. The software is very handy, especially since you can no longer buy other cutting software that is compatible with the Cricut. It is very user friendly and the weld feature is priceless.

The only draw backs are that you must own the cartridge you choose to use. The software will only do Cricut cuts. You cannot load other images to cut.

Thanks for coming by this week’s edition of Do You Speak Cricut Saturday!