CRICUT: Design Space... first impressions

These are my first observations of the Cricut Design Space program. 

I'm keeping in mind that it's new and that there may be changes/additions. And I get that I'm used to using CCR and the old Design Studio.... 

I had such high hopes for this program and really wanted it to be amazing! The Explore looks like such a great machine... it deserves great software. Don't get me wrong.... it absolutely does have its great points, but the negatives are big ones in my opinion. (And as it's my opinion, no-one has to agree with me...)

Many of us use other brand cutters beside the Cricut so we are used to other design programs. And those programs are amazing and have all the features you would expect to get the best out of your cutter. (Offset anyone???)

So, as I said... my first observations...

Pros

• When you select an image and place it on the mat, all the layers are placed at the same time. (However if you only want one or two parts of the image you have to ungroup and delete or hide the unwanted parts.)

• You can move the images around on the cut preview screen. That means you can load your mat up with different colour cardstock and just keep selecting which layer you want to cut. Just because the mat you see at the cut screen is totally covered with one colour, it doesn't mean you have to use full sheets of cardstock.

• Not sure if this fits in the Pro or Con category, or whether it's just an oddity.....Dragging the middle left arrow to the right horizontally flips the object. Dragging the right middle arrow to the left flips the object. Same goes for bottom middle arrow, but it flips vertically. Unfortunately the shape also stretches while you're flipping... so I'm not sure how useful this is.
  
  (I'd much prefer one of these arrows be a move handle so you could move your object horizontally or vertically.)

   

• You can do multiple lines of text in one text box and you can left/center and right align them. You can also increase the line space between the lines of text.

 

Once you've typed your text click on the All Fonts heading in the Edit box to change between All Fonts, System Fonts (those that are on your own computer), Cricut Fonts, Single Layer and Has a Writing Style.

Each time you select a different font the text in the preview box will change.

• You can select multiple images from the carts/image library and insert them onto the canvas at the same time

• There's a score line image that you can insert onto your shape. Yay!! No more ugly tick marks!!!

(Unfortunately.... that image currently says it's unavailable. Hopefully that will be fixed soon!)  Fixed!

It's a bit clunky to use. I think some more work needs to be done here. It's difficult to resize and also difficult to position in the correct place on your object. (Make sure after you have placed the score mark on your mat, you click on the little constrain proportions image between the width and height boxes. That will allow you to keep the width at 0.01" while setting the height to whatever you need.)

The score line is now easier to use since the April 2014 update! 

You can rotate the score line to make it horizontal or at an angle, but you can't curve it.

To find it type "Score line" in the Search box (with All Images selected) then press the search button.

• And of course, the most important "pro" to some is the ability to import svg, dxf, jpg, gif, png and bmp image files and cut them on the Explore. For links to some popular online stores that sell svg's etc look in the sidebar to the right of this post.

Cons

• There's no Cricut keypad..... not sure whether that's good or bad, or whether it really doesn't matter considering all the layers are placed on the mat for you.

• You have to ungroup images/text before you can use Hide Contour.

• Even on my brand spanking new souped-up computer and fast internet speeds there is still lag.

• You have to ungroup images/text to weld. Remember Cricut Craft Room....where two images only have to touch each other and they are automatically welded....? 

• You can't unweld!!! Seriously... so you've gone to all the trouble of ungrouping your images/text so you can weld them.  Then later you decide you don't like how/where you've welded them and want to move the weld position.... Too bad - you'll have to restart because you can't unweld them. (You can select Edit, Undo but say you've done 5 other actions since you welded... you'll have to undo all of those first before you can undo the weld.)

• There is no offset function! This one really upsets me. Seriously.... how long have we been begging for this??  Stretching an existing shadow is in no way comparable to being able to create an offset. Or multiple offsets...  If I weld letters into a title (still rolling my eyes about the welding) and then attach an image to it, I want to be able to create an offset shadow around it.
  
  Just like the yellow offset around this image from the Groovy Times... this is what I want to be able to do.

• There's no skew function

• There is no Align function. If you want to align multiple objects (eg at the top) you'll have to change the Y coordinate on each of them individually to be the same. Selecting all the objects and changing the Y coordinate moves them all but only one of the objects you select will move to that coordinate. The others will move up or down but not to the Y coordinate you set.

Fixed! An align tool has since been added. 

• There is no crop tool... or eraser tool. (There's now a slice tool though which is pretty cool.)
  
• You can't cut images that have gone outside the mat boundaries. If the image is larger than 12" wide, when you click the Go button you will get an error saying the image is too large for the mat.

I think PC really did themselves a disservice here. They had an amazing opportunity to make their new machine able to cut a true 12x12 image and they didn't take it. I wanted to make a card base the other day that was 12x12... it can't be done!

• Can't move images that you don't want to cut off to the side of the canvas as they are placed back within the cutting boundary. (Instead you click the Hide/Unhide button and that image won't appear on the Cut screen.

• The middle left handle doesn't move the image to the left, it stretches it. (The same applies to the middle top, bottom and right handles.) This makes moving image horizontally or vertically on its X or Y measurement impossible unless you repeatedly use the arrows on your keyboard (because holding down the arrow doesn't work) or you use the X & Y coordinates in the Edit menu. Which leads me to......
  
   (The handles have since been moved to the corners of the image.)

• The Y coordinate is fiddly to change...  To change the X coordinate you just drag your mouse over the figure in the box and you can overtype it. With the Y coordinate you have to hover to the right of the box until you see the little "I beam" then click and drag backwards to select the figure.. then overtype it. That's a pretty easy thing to fix though...

Looks like they fixed this problem. :)

• Right clicking doesn't show you which font/image you have used. But the layers box will tell you the name of the cart. 

So, I'm sure it used to show you the name of the cart in the layers box, but now it doesn't even do that! 

• There are no cutting boundary indicators on the canvas so you won't know something is too big or goes outside the cutting boundary until you click the Go button

• The mat canvas sits at X 1.0" and Y 1.0" instead of at 0" (The screen you design on isn't actually a mat. It's more like your desk where you toss everything you're working with on it. Once you have everything where you want it you press cut and DS sorts everything by colour and moves everything that's the same colour to a cutting mat.

• You can only have one canvas open at a time. 

That's it for now!