Cricut Design Space is an intuitive design studio where anyone can touch up and organise designs before projects are cut up on a Cricut machine.

For the uninitiated, a "Cricut" is a postmodern hardware design tool, designed to function as a cutting machine. It was developed as a home prototyping tool for students and craft enthusiasts by Cricut Inc in the USA, with the original flagship cutting tool called the "Cricut", followed up by evolved editions such as the "Cricut Expression", the "Cricut Expression 2", the "Cricut Imagine", the "Cricut Mini" and the "Cricut Cake".

Some of the more current models in circulation (your child is likely to be designing projects to be cut on one of these device variants) include the "Cricut Joy", the "Cricut Maker" and the "Cricut Explore". Today's students find it easy to use these machines for planning, interfacing, and cutting craft materials (such as paper, felt, vinyl, fabric, leather, matte-board, wood, etc.) with a high degree of precision. In today's advanced and competitive curricula, the knowledge and applied intelligence of a Cricut device go a long way towards shaping up a child's potential for creative expression.

A Cricut device is more than just a prototyping aid. If you can imagine and source the material to be cut on a Cricut machine, irrespective of how commonly available or how rare the commodity is - it will allow you to cut and create beautiful and magnificent pieces of craft and high functional utility. Different versions of the device also allow users to draw, emboss and create folding lines to make 3D projects, greeting cards, and boxes. Cricut devices are fantastic tools for students who love crafting, and people who constantly need to cut a lot of things and different material types, in their daily choice of trade.

Procuring a Cricut machine today is as easy as running a search query on Amazon or any of your favourite eCommerce portals, and placing an order. Putting a Cricut machine to the right use, however - is an entirely different story and majorly dependent on your ability to get the measurements of your craft (or in your case - the measurements needed for your child's pet project) to be precise and on point. For easy reference, browse over to the encyclopedia of precise measurement techniques (Measurement made easy with Cuemath).

Cricut Design Space - An Introduction

The "Cricut Design Space" is a dedicated and intuitive interface on the accompanying application suite with your Cricut device. This "canvas area" is technically the place where all the beautiful imagination translates into lines, shapes, and measurements. All of the innovative magic of a "Cricut Project" happens in the design space.

The Design Space is also a studio where templated designs can be further customised, touched up, or organised. This space allows you to upload all the custom fonts and images needed for your child's project, in addition to offering a wide selection of premium images from the Cricut stock image gallery. Users also have the option to purchase premium fonts one at a time, as seen necessary for the project.

Cricut Design Space - Understanding The Layout

Cricut Design Space is a fantastic interface to learn and adapt to, especially if you have prior experience in using design tools "of yore" such as Photoshop or Illustrator, from Adobe's "Creative Cloud" family of products. Alternatively, for people who are well-versed with cloud-based DIY tools and design platforms such as Canva, Magisto, PhotoPea, or Adobe Spark, the positioning of tools, markers, pointers and navigation elements shouldn't appear too alien.

For easy understanding, the interface can broadly be categorised into four main sections (three panels and one canvas) that are available on the default application setting:

• The Top Panel – Also known as the "Editing Area".
• The Left Panel – Also known as the "Insert Area".
• The Right Panel – Also known as the "Layers Panel".
• The Canvas Area.

A Brief Understanding of the Editing Area Within Cricut Design Space

Top Panel

The Top Panel (also known as the Editing Area) is reserved for editing and arranging the elements to be used inside the canvas area. This panel allows you to choose and customise specific aspects of your design, such as the font or typeface, size (and length), design alignment, and much more.

Some of the key segments to be populated while toggling through this menu interface, include:

Project Name

All blank projects launched within the Cricut Design Space are automatically assigned an "Untitled title". A project can be assigned a name within the canvas area only when at least one element has been placed, such as an image or a shape or a piece of text. In this tutorial, we will focus on creating a rectangle with the right measurements, as our element of choice. To learn more about the measurements that make or break the perfect rectangle, refer to the simple measurement guide at Cuemath.

My Projects

When you click on "My Projects", the interface will redirect you towards a library of all the pre-existing projects (designs and things that you have already created with your account). This is a great feature because you can create a template for all your future projects and then make copies of the same to create variations - a great tip when planning a craft calendar for your child.

Save

Just like the title space, the option to "Save" your design in the canvas area becomes active only after at least one element has been placed in the studio. Since this is a cloud-based tool equipped with an autosave feature, manual saving is rendered redundant. But if you are on a home internet connection, manual save triggers are always recommended.

Maker – Explorer (Machine)

Depending on the type of Cricut Device that will be used to cut the design in progress, you will be able to select either the "Cricut Joy", the "Maker", or the "Cricut Explore" machine. This is an important step and cannot be overlooked, since each machine variant is pre-loaded with specific design options and precision cutting instructions.

Understanding the Editing Menu within Cricut Design Space

Editing Menu

The "Editing Menu" is a sub-panel within the Editing Area of Cricut Design Space, and the key panel that we will focus on, in this article. This panel is extremely useful in the creation and organisation of new projects, and it will help you in editing, arranging, and organising fonts and images to be used within the Canvas Area.

Undo/Redo

This menu also comes equipped with a convenient Undo/Redo function toggle, allowing you to switch between recent changes with immediate ease and effect.

Linetype and Fill

This option tells your chosen Cricut variant device what tools and blades are expected to be used during the physical execution (cutting) of the project. The options that show up for you under this screen will depend totally on the machine type that you've selected at the top of the window.

The eight most common Linetype options visible within the Cricut Design Space are Cut, Draw, Score, Engrave, Deboss, Wave, Perf, and Foil. They are associated with the type of precision instructions to be applied during cutting.

Explore

The "Explore" range of Cricut devices will allow you to use the Draw function.

Exploring the Insert Area to Use Shapes (such as Rectangles) in Your Design

The left menu panel, also known as the Insert Area, is what you will need to use, in order to bring a rectangular shape to the canvas area. If you take a peek at the default layout of the left panel, you will see the "+ New" button at the top, followed by icons that are representative of Templates, Projects, Images, Text, Shapes, and Uploads, in that order, going from top to bottom.

We will use the Shapes tab on the left to launch a pop-up submenu, with graphical representations of all the available default shapes. Note that a rectangle is not visible among the list of options at first glance. No need to worry, though - just select "Square" from the list of shapes (click on the icon for square), and move forward.

A square will now appear in the canvas area. You can resize the square element by dragging its vertices, or by clicking on the element and adjusting its side length in the Editing Menu.

How to Turn a Square into a Rectangle in Cricut Design Space (The Magic Step)

A square element is nothing but a locked rectangle element of fixed proportions in the Cricut Design Space interface. To unlock these proportions and turn it into a rectangle, all you need to do is click on the tiny lock icon that becomes visible at the bottom left corner of the element when you hover your mouse pointer over the square element.

Once the image of the lock changes to an unlocked variant, you will notice that the Editing Menu allows you to manually enter different length and width variables for the same element. Playing around with these measurements to achieve your desired rectangular shape (Check out this glossary of precision terms - Measurement made easy with Cuemath) is one way to get a rectangle fired up. Another way is to manually drag the edges with your mouse and adjust the shape into a rectangle on the screen.

Summary

Knowing your way around precision measurements is a great skill when planning shapes on the Cricut Canvas Area. Owing to the accuracy needs of your child's project and the specific amount of exposure/linetype required during the physical cutting, it is always advisable that you use measurements on the Editing Panel when designing and aligning a rectangle within Cricut Design Space.