How to Cut and Write on the Cricut

I’ll show you how to use the writing feature on your Cricut – and how to make the text look good!

How do I find a font that will write well? Are there any free writing fonts for Cricut?

First, you need to have fonts that work for writing on your Cricut.

Any font will write, but it may look like an outline.

You can buy fonts in Design Space that work perfectly for writing, or you can use the cheap way (like me!) and find frees ones that look like writing fonts.

Any font that is not purchased from Cricut’s Design Space will write as an outline. The trick is to choose a very narrow font so that it looks like one line, instead of two. If you don’t do this, the text will be an outline.

Heather‘s blog has a list of fonts that she’s tested and work for her. I’ve tested a few of them myself.

Please note, these are all for personal use only. You can’t use them on anything you intend to sell!

Hello Ellie
AlwaysHere
InDesign Signature
Kaleidescope
Beautiful Friends
Stymie Hairline Regular
Stymie Stylus
Matilde

Download and install the fonts before you open Design Space on your computer. If it’s open, quit the program and restart it after you have installed the new fonts for writing. (The font list only loads when the program starts up.)

So which fonts really work well?

Here are a few samples.

As you can see, they are each set at the 30 point size and I used the Cricut 0.4 tip marker (the sample marker that comes with your machine.)

When you use non-Cricut fonts, the spacing can be very off.

Look at the lines that say “Cricut Marker 0.4 Tip.” AlwaysHere, Kaleidoscope and Hello Ellie look good, but InDesign Signature has a big space after the Ts and there is no spacing between the words.

This is a common issue with fonts. For some reason, the space between words doesn’t show up, so everything runs together. Itmaylooksomethinglikethis.Notcool.

If you are writing just a few words, it’s not too time-consuming to fix it manually. However, if you are writing several sentences or lots of text, you may want to choose a font that has correct spacing instead of spending the time painstakingly moving each letter to a place that looks better.

Above are a few more examples of fonts. You can see that Matilde has the same spacing issue. Perhaps Beautiful Friends would write better a bit bigger?

See how the fonts look like an outline? We are looking for thin fonts so that the letters’ outlines almost write on top of each other, giving the appearance of a single pen stroke.

I still don’t love the Beautiful Friends font, and I’d prefer to use another font. However, it might be exactly the right style for your project.

What fonts will write well in a smaller point size? Above are my favorites. I liked InDesign Signature enough to manually move the letters to a spacing I preferred, but I wouldn’t use it for a lot of text.

How do I change the spacing between the letters or characters?

In this example, I don’t like how the number 6 is much larger than the number 1.

It’s simple to adjust; we’ll just move and resize each character manually.

With the text box highlighted, go to the Advanced drop-down menu and choose Ungroup to Letters.

Now, each character has a separate box. You can move and resize them individually. (When you are satisfied with the way the text looks, Attach the individual characters together again.)

All of these tests and settings got me wondering….. does the Cricut change anything in the way it draws based on the marker tip size setting??

I had to test it.

Both of these were written using the Medium Tip 1.0 Violet (metallic) marker from Cricut.

One test was set to use the marker I specified above, and the other was set at the Fine Point .04 Tip Cricut marker.

I couldn’t see any difference.

See the little white spaces on the tips of the letter M? Both test sheets had it, so I concluded that it doesn’t actually matter if you set the marker size to your specific marker.

✨Tips and Tricks for Writing with Cricut✨

Choose and test the styles for writing BEFORE you create all of the text boxes.

If you need a tutorial on creating textboxes or attaching text to cut-outs, go to Step 3 in the Cricut Pen Projects – Relationship Infographic tutorial.

Physical items affect how the writing looks:

🖊 paper’s surface texture and finish
🖊 size of the marker
🖊 how new the marker is (if the tip is worn out, the writing will look fuzzy)

It took me three tries to get it to look good!

When I tested the HelloEllie font in a smaller size (test #1 in the above photo), I discovered that the writing looked blurry. The cheap paper that I used was part of the problem; it was too porous and the ink spread.

I tried making the font larger and increasing the letter spacing, along with using a thicker paper. It didn’t help much (as you can see from test #2.)

Finally, I switched to a new, dark blue marker instead of my well-used black marker – and that solved the problem! (I also used card stock with a similar coating as the orange paper. I was satisfied with test #3.)

When you are working with a lot of text, the file gets HUGE!

It WILL take a long time to select or move text.

Just wait patiently and don’t click on anything again.

Double-check that the Line Type is set to Draw!

In one version of Design Space, any time that you changed the font or spacing in a Draw text box, the line type would convert back to Cut.

Look at each layer. It should have Draw next to a letter.

If you see Cut (as I found on the circled lines), click on that line to select it and then change the Linetype to Draw and choose the correct color of marker.

Hold the Shift Key and click to select multiple lines at the same time.

Help! All of my text is jumbled together when I preview it!

That means it is not attached to anything. It should be attached either to other text boxes, or to a shape to be cut out.

Now that you’ve learned all about writing with Cricut, are you ready for a project using those pens?

Try creating your own Relationship Infographic that goes in the center of the Easy Heart Explosion Box!