- Export From Cricut Design Space
- How Do I Export Svg From Design Space
- Export Svg Files From Cricut Design Space
- Time needed: 10 minutes. Upload SVG Files to Cricut Design Space. Find.svg or.dxf File. Once you identify the location of the.svg or.dxf file you want to upload, Open File Selector. Go to the File Selector in Cricut Design Space and select Open. Drag and drop File. You can also drag and drop the file into the Design Space image upload window.
- In the dropdown Format menu, select SVG and save! Don’t worry about any of the options in the pop-up—just hit OK and your file will save as an SVG that you can open in the Cricut Design Space or Silhouette Studio Designer Edition.
Explanation –.svg and.dxf files are vector formats and Cricut Design Space uses these to create cut files that separate your designs into layers based on color. When your file contains images, photographs or gradients Cricut Design Space can no longer create a file with a separate layer for each shape and color. Solution – Export your.
I LOVE to create my own designs for all kinds of things like signs, printables, special gifts and now, thanks to the Cricut Maker… Sewing projects! The issue that I ran into at the beginning was figuring out how to effectively use my own SVG files in Cricut Design Space. If you’re like me, and would like to either use either your own designs or other designs that you purchase from Etsy or other sites, this video tutorial is for you!
Whether you are a sign maker, a paper crafter or you love to work with fabric, chances are you’ve wanted to either create your own SVG files or download files that you’ve purchased and use them with your Cricut Projects. The Cricut Design Space is pretty robust but there are times when you need a little more in the design area. For example, create curved text and such for a project. I stumbled across a way to covert PDF sewing patterns into SVG files to use with my Cricut Maker. Don’t worry, I’ll have a tutorial for that soon. Today, I want to focus on how to import and use that SVG file into Cricut Design Space and use it effectively. I’ve been working on this for a bit so I’ve managed to come-up with some great tips and tricks to help speed-up your work flow in order to cut down on possibly technology frustration.
Video Tutorial on How to Import and Use Your SVG Files in Cricut Design Space
Take a few minutes to sit and watch this video. I promise it will make your time in the Cricut Design Space much easier!
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Let’s say you created a lovely vector illustration in Adobe Illustrator. Or you’ve used Illustrator to finesse some existing graphics. Or for literally any reason at all, you have a file open in Adobe Illustrator that you ultimately want to use on the web as SVG.
There are several different ways of getting SVG out of Illustrator, each one a bit different. Let’s take a look.
TL;DR: Exporting, like File > Export > Export As… SVG then optimizing is your best bet for the web.
The “Save As…” Method
Illustrator supports SVG as a first-class file format. You can File > Save As… and choose “SVG” as an option, as an alternative to the default `.ai` file format.
There is even a button in the Save SVG options that come up called “SVG Code…” you can click to have Illustrator show you the code before saving it, presumably for copy-and-paste purposes.
If you search the web a bit about the differences between saving in different formats from Illustrator, you’ll find plenty of generic information telling you that SVG is for use on THE WORLD WIDE WEB, so if that’s where you intend to use this graphic, that’s the format you should save in.
Be careful here. Saving as SVG from Illustrator is fine, but the file is absolutely not ready for direct use on the web. When you “Save As…” from Illustrator as SVG, Illustrators primary concern is that you can open that file again in Illustrator just as you left it.
For example, Illustrator has proprietary features that aren’t a part of SVG. A simple example: guides. You won’t lose your guides saving as SVG this way, they are preserved just fine. But guides are meaningless in SVG on the web, so you’d be sending useless data if you use SVG saved this way directly on the web.
The file size of “Save As…” saved Illustrator SVG’s can be several orders of magnitude larger than a really web-ready version. Take a look at the CSS-Tricks logo “Save As…”‘d and one exported for the web.
It’s not entirely clear to us why “Save As…”ing as SVG would be a good idea. You may just want to keep files as `.ai` until you want to actually export for the web. Or if you do save as SVG, you might as well use the “Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities” checkbox and use a naming convention that is clear this is an “original” file, not a web-ready one.
Wait, “exported version”? Let’s look at that next.
The “Export As” Method
Export From Cricut Design Space
File > Export > Export As… is very different. You are “exporting”, and the implication is that the file that is generated is no longer an Illustrator-friendly and editable file, but a new file specifically for some other purpose.
JPG is one of the options, for example. You wouldn’t expect to be able to edit your vector art after exporting it as a JPG.
SVG is an option here too. The output is vastly different than “Save As…”. Exported SVGs actually are pretty close to web-ready. There is no weird doctype, loads of metadata, or proprietary Illustrator stuff. Exported SVG likely will not open in Illustrator in exactly the same way it was in the original file.
You’ll get a minimal export options screen, like this:
The options shown there are good defaults. Quick overview:
- Styling: “Presentation Attributes” means stuff like fill: red; rather than “Inline Styles” which means style=”fill: red;”. Presentation attributes are easier to override in CSS. Inline styles provide more style resilience. There is also an option to export styles in a
<style>
block within the SVG, which may be efficient on SVG with lots of similar elements. - Font: “SVG” means to use
elements (and friends), which is extremely efficient, provided the fonts you’ve used are available on the web site you intended to use it on. “Convert to Outlines” will turn the text into vector shapes on export, making sure it will look exactly right, but losing efficient, accessibility, searchability, and copy-ability. - Images: “Link” means that if there happens to be raster graphics within the SVG, it will link out to them rather than embedding them within the SVG, versus “Embed”ding them.
- Object ID’s: Unique ensures that every ID is unique (good for the web), but you also have the option to make them very short (“Minimal”) or be based on layer names.
- Decimal: 2 is probably fine. You’d only go up if you knew you were working with a really tiny viewBox and needed a lot of precision, or down if you were working on a giant viewBox.
- Minify: We’re exporting for the web, so, yes.
- Responsive: On means “don’t put
width
andheight
attribute”. Off means do. It actually might be smart leaving this off (see here).
![Export Export](/uploads/1/1/4/0/114046019/830046444.jpg)
Exporting this way is definitely good for the web. Although SVGO can still squeak a little bit more efficiency out of it yet, depending on the graphic of course.
![Design Design](/uploads/1/1/4/0/114046019/991975522.jpg)
The “Export for Screens” Method
Since version CC 2017, Illustrator has an File > Export > Export for Screens… method built specifically for exporting for digital devices. I’d say “the web”, but it has features for exporting for iOS and Android, so “Screens”, as they say, is appropriate.
This brings up an options dialog allowing us to select our artwork in different ways and exports the parts we want in the formats we want.
This is really convenient UI! We can export just parts of our illustration in not only SVG, but other formats as well, at the same exact time. Picture an icon system. 20 artboards in a single document, and with one command you export all of them as SVG and multiple resolutions of PNG. Pretty nice.
Under the hood, it appears to be using the same system as “Export”, so you’ll get web-optimized output.
Artboards is one way of splitting up artwork to be exported separately. There is also an Asset Export panel that allows you to drag-and-drop bits of artwork intended to be output separately.
The “Copy Directly from the Artboard” Method
Speaking of selecting individual bits of artwork intended to be used as SVG, there is a slightly-lesser-known way to extract bits, and that’s as simple as Edit > Copy.
How Do I Export Svg From Design Space
After copying, your clipboard will have inline SVG code on it that you can paste as text.
Export Svg Files From Cricut Design Space
The code that you get is slightly different than any method we’ve looked at so far. It’s closest to the “Save As…” format though, in that you get the XML doctype and such. It’s not the web-optimized format we get from exporting. It does have it’s own
viewBox
cropped exactly to the elements edges. If you use this to drop SVG right into your HTML, plan to do a little manual code cleanup.
Now that you have the SVG…
… now what?
- Perhaps you’re gathering individual SVG icon files for use in an SVG icon system. As in, using a build tool to process them into a single file full of
<symbol>
s to<use>
. - Perhaps you needed the `.svg` to use as an
<img>
. - Perhaps you needed the `.svg` to use as a
background-image
in CSS. - Perhaps you’re going to drop the SVG code into HTML directly as inline SVG.
There are many ways to use SVG, but that always starts with getting the SVG to work with in the first place.