Editing Text in Cricut Design Space

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WELCOME:) And thank you so much for being here! It means the world to me.

Today we are going to be talking about text because there are so many things you can do with your text in Cricut Design Space. You can add swirls to your text to create a new font, you can curve the text, and you can also Monogram the text.

YES, SO MANY THINGS WITH TEXT THAT YOU CAN DO! It’s Amazing!

See my friends, once you have the basics of editing text down, the sky is truly your limit!

You can make everything from a rad car decal to a home decor sign, to a mug or shirt, either way, this article about text will help you along the way!

New to Cricut Design Space? No worries, I got you covered here with my Ultimate Beginners Guide to Cricut Design Space.

*This post may contain affiliate links for your convenience. If you make a purchase through my links, I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you! Read my full disclosure for more info

Getting Started

First, let’s have you start by opening up Cricut design space.

Go to the three lines in the top left corner and go to the canvas. A new blank Canvas should pop up on your screen. See the image below.

This is what your canvas looks like. Except I forgot to get rid of the images I had on there. MY BAD… Yours will not have anything in the right-hand side panel.

Alright, so you now have a blank canvas started and to the left, you have a text icon, click on that and a text box will appear on your canvas. You can write something incredible about yourself! See the image below.

When you have text highlighted on your screen another box appears for it on the top panel. You can see it above in the image. This panel consists of font, style, font size, letter spacing, line spacing, alignment, curve, and advanced.

FONTS:

When you click on the font icon another box appears showcasing all the fonts for you! Cricut even makes it easier for you if you know where the font you want is located.

You can decide between all fonts, Cricut fonts, or your system’s font from here. You can even search for a font by name if you know the name of the one you want to use. And finally, you can search by how many layers a font has.

For example, if you wanted a font with three layers you can search for a font with three layers. How COOL is that?

Can I add my own Fonts?

You can always look for free fonts to use. If you need more free fonts to work with please check out my article Where to find free fonts.

I usually find most of my fonts on FontBundles, CreativeFabrica, DaFont, Creative Market, and the hungryJPEG.

Just a quick reminder and note about using fonts:

When looking for new free font please be aware of the license it comes with. If you are going to be making a project to sell please look to make sure you have the right to do that. The license it comes with will tell you what you can and can NOT do with the font.

4 of my favorite fonts from Font Bundles

Just click on the photos of the fonts to be taken right to them. You can also click on the creator underneath the photo to see what else that creator has made.

Downloading fonts

Now throughout those sites, you found new fonts you really like and want to incorporate into a project. AWESOME!

Click on the font you want to download. It should automatically download into your download file. Depending on where you download the file from, the process may be a bit different.

Fonts and images usually come in a Zip file so you need to find that file, click on it, and extract all into a destination you want it to go. See the picture below.

I put the 2 steps together. So find that file and click on it, once you do that the extract window will pop up.

Hit the EXTRACT ALL button and the destination folder will pop up. This is where you will be saving it to. Hit extract and there you have it! You did it:)

Another box will pop up with where you saved it to.

If you want step-by-step instructions you can check out my article on How to Unzip, Extract, and upload an SVG into Cricut Design Space.

Once the files are extracted you will see all the options and variations of the font in one folder. This funcactus font came with 6 different items.

You should always go through the documents that come with fonts. Some explain how to install them and gives you the best practices around them.

You do NOT need to install everything! You can pick either the Open Type font file or the TrueType Font file.

OpenType & TrueType

So there are two versions that you can see which I mentioned above. Open Type font file or True Type font file.

I usually go with Open Type, but some systems don’t allow one or the other. So your first few fonts try it out. Download one and see what it looks like and if that one doesn’t work then download the other.

But try to stick with just one type.

OpenType is the newer version of the two so most people stick with that one.

Installing the font

So now that we have found the file we are working with (back window), double click or click on it (depending on your computer) and a screen with the font should pop up (front window). There is an install button in the top left, go ahead and click on it. The new font you just installed is now a part of your system’s fonts:) YOU DID IT!!!!

Just a quick note: If you have Cricut Design Space open when you are downloading fonts you may have to exit out completely and re-open it to see your new fonts in there.

How do I access the special Characters for the fonts?

Nothing is more invigorating than creating fansy dansy fonts with elongated tails or soft swooshes. Some free fonts include these so make sure you check that out as well when you are downloading your fonts.

Accessing the Character Map or Font Book

On your computer, not in design space, you should have a search icon. Mine is in the bottom left-hand corner, but yours could be somewhere else.

In your computer’s search bar search for Character Map for Window users or Font Book for MAC users. In the image below I started to search in my computer’s browser for cha and it popped up.

Click on Character Map (Windows) or Font Book (mac) to open it up. Now don’t get scared! I am right here to walk you through this!

I know this screen can be pretty intimidating especially if you don’t know what do. In the picture below, you can see what the character map looks like.

 NOTE: Before I get started I feel the need to tell you that you must pick a font that has special characters or glyphs for this to work.

Character Map Settings

Continuing on, pick the font that you want to use from the drop-down menu. Remember it has to be a font with special characters or glyphs.

Next, check the “advanced view” to access the special characters and glyphs. Make sure the character set is on Unicode and group by is set to Unicode subrange.

You will see another small pop-up box, scroll all the way down until you reach Private Use Characters, and click on it. Now you should be seeing all those special characters on your map! Image Below.

Select the letter you want to use and go to the select button and hit select.

That will then put the selected letter into the characters to copy area. Please make sure that the letter is highlighted and then go ahead and hit that copy button.

Next, Paste the letter you just copied into design space over the letter you want to replace. To paste on windows ctrl+V and for mac it is command+V.

NOTE: This will appear as a box in your text edit window but will look fine on your canvas.

You would then alter the text because it is not put together very well which is the next thing we will be talking about.

Fixing and Combining Text

So, as we saw in the picture above, Cricut Design Space doesn’t actually make your text look pretty with some fonts and the spacing is all off, so we have to fix that.

There are two ways to do that, 1. You can use the letter spacer on the top panel or 2. you can completely ungroup all the letters and move each letter individually. Refer to the picture below.

Letter Spacing at the top

Letter Spacing can save you a ton of time, but it doesn’t always work out. LOL You can reduce the letter space on the top panel. 

The lower the number goes, the closer together your letters will get, and vice versa. If you just have a few minor tweaks, then I would try this first. You will know within a few seconds if you can get away with using this.

Ungrouping your text

So the letter-spacing didn’t work and that’s ok because there’s another way. The second way is to ungroup all the letters.

Select the text that you want to ungroup so that you can move them closer together or further apart. Select all and hit that ungroup button.

Now if you go to move it, it all moves separately. Each letter is its own layer. Now all you have to do is move the letters to where you want them. Once you are satisfied with how it looks select each letter or you can draw a box around it with your mouse and hit that GROUP BUTTON!

BONUS TIP: If you are working on a windows computer, left-click and drag, it should drag a blue box around the area. That will select everything within that box.

This is IMPORTANT or you will have to do that all over again if you go to move it and it’s not GROUPED BACK TOGETHER!!!

Can you tell I have done that many times with how I stressed that? LOL Yeah, we are all guilty of that and it’s such a pain to get it back the way you had it. (hint-the undo and redo buttons are great for things like this.)

Once you know that text is good and you won’t change it again, you can go ahead and weld your text together.

Welding your text together means that it is one solid unit and it will be cut as one piece. If you get to the make it part and your letters are all over the place you forgot to weld them together. OH man, I wish I would have known that when I first started.

How do I Curve my text?

Alright so now we are moving on! YOU are doing great!!!

We are now going into curving the text in Cricut Design Space. Cricut Design Space actually makes this super simple and fun.

First things first, we need to choose a font. I am keeping it simple and using Adobe Arabic for this example. Now write some text on your screen. I wrote you are a rockstar because YOU ARE!

Once you are done writing make sure it is selected and go to the curve feature and slide it around. Your text is curving all by sliding that little button around on the curve feature. How cool is that?

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Monograms with Cricut Design Space

Monograms are becoming more and more popular these days so why not learn how to make them for yourself, your family, and friends.

First, start with a letter and a square on your canvas. Size the letter pretty big so it’s easier to work with. You can always resize once you are done creating it.

Next, we are going to unlock that square and stretch it to a rectangle across the letter you chose. See the picture below.

Most of the time you would want that rectangle you just made a bit longer than the letter you chose. Be aware of the size you make your rectangle because there will be writing that goes in there!

Once you have everything how you want it, go ahead and select both the letter and square, which is now a rectangle, and go down to that slice button on the bottom right corner and hit it!

See the image below for results. There are extra pieces that come from a slice. You can highlight them and delete them.

We now have room for text in our letter that we just sliced.

We are now going to add lines to the monogram. Just like before, we are going to grab another square and unlock it to form the lines.

So unlock that square and drag it out into a line. When you find that perfect length and width, go ahead and duplicate it and use it as your bottom line. That’s a time saver! Example below.

Centering your lines

Now that we have lines we need to center those lines to the letter. You will need to select the letter and two lines and once you have those selected go up to your alignment button in the top panel and hit center horizontally. It will center your letter to those two lines we made.

Attaching

While everything is still selected let’s go ahead and hit the attach button in the bottom right-hand corner. That way if we do move it, it will move as a unit because it is attached to each other.

If you are working with different colors once you attach something it will take the color of the back shape. You can always change the color of the whole thing before we cut.

Writing & Editing the Center Text

The last thing we need to do is put the writing in the center. So go ahead and hit the text icon and write whatever is going in the center.

You may have to ungroup the text to get it just right like we did before and once that’s done you will size it to fit the gap in your monogram. See the picture below.

Now, Let’s say you think you’re ready to cut and hit the make it button to come to a mat that looks like this.

See the picture below.😲🙄😑 WHOOPS!

So we are going to have to cancel that cut and go back to the image we were working with. Make sure you have everything attached and welded so your Cricut knows what it is doing. You have to tell it what you want.

Welding will make it one whole piece. The text should always get welded together so Cricut knows it’s one piece.

Attaching letters will attach them together but still cut individual letters.

WOOHOO!!! Let us Celebrate! YOU DID IT!!!

CONGRATULATIONS!!!

WOW, You have learned a lot! I can not wait to see all those amazing creations popping up all over!

If this article helped you, please share it so it can help others too!!! Thank you so much for taking the time to be here with me.

SO TELL ME

What kind of projects are you making right now?

What are some of the things you struggle with?

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