Silhouette Design Studio

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Areyou wanting to sell them via their store? As I am also interested in doing that if so..... I would think (I don't know for sure as I still can't seem to find an answer on how to even become a designer for them......) but I would think you would have to design them in SIL format. I have seen however, that you are not allowed to sell SIL formats anywhere other then their site via them??? Now to figure out how to do that ....... :-)

ages ago(permalink)

The agreement you make when using the Silhouette Studio software is that you won't sell Studio files. "Files in STUDIO format created with the Software may not be resold without express written consent from Silhouette America." (See Help>License Agreement)

If you do want to sell them, they will need to be converted to another format which is hard to do. From what I've heard, even the Silhouette designers must design them in something like Adobe Illustrator so they are submitted in SVG format. If you want to be a professional designer, it would be wise to look into a different program like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape.

ages ago(permalink)

What design programs do you have at home? I haven't checked yet if they export svg files but I've recently purchased idraw and pixelmator as my alternative products to illustrator and photoshop as Adobe is expensive. I hope these programs do or might in the future as I'm hoping to design my own designs too. Good luck with your designs and selling to the store.

ages ago(permalink)

Adobe Illustrator can export svg files. You can subscribe to Adobe's Creative Cloud to use Illustrator for $20 a month. There's an education discount if your a student or teacher. If you need to import svg to Silhouette, you need the designer edition though.

118 months ago(permalink)

I use the 'Make the Cut' program and its fantastic for converting directly to svg, and many other formats. It is extremely user friendly and does not require a huge learning curve. I am also interested in selling via the Silhouette store, as I've designed hundreds of my own items, but don't know how this is done. MTC is very cost effective and the developer gives lifelong free upgrades and runs seminars all the time. I believe their software is about $67 and you can get discounts from various sources.

Originally posted 111 months ago. (permalink)

soccershotz1 edited this topic 111 months ago.

If you want to become a designer to sell your designs in the Silhouette store, I have heard that they require you to design in Adobe Illustrator. I think the contact for going that route is he...@silhouetteamerica.com.

111 months ago(permalink)

I can not get my silhouette studio to work. The program freezes when i am in the design studio, especially when i try to trace and detach,do any modifying options, or edit points. The time i do get to spend on it without it freezing it runs slow...ex may take 5 min for the file to save.

I have tried uninstalling and reinstalled multiple times, i did the %app????% and %program???% thingies please look over my high tech wordingI'm just that computer savvy i have ran every troubleshooting thing i can find. Ive deleted exe files and others as well. i have opened firewall made a port, made sure everything was up to date, scanned system and hardware files, optimized and defragmenting things.

what is confusing is sometimes the program acts decently well, no freezes. but it always lets me down the next time i turn my computer on. everything Ive read online suggests that silhouette and windows 10 just doesnt work well together altho windows 8 worked better windows 7 was the best. i know this laptop came with a different window and i upgraded to windows 10 but i don't know which windows it was or how to find out so i can downgrade to it.

The free version of Silhouette Studio is called the Basic Edition. The Basic Edition is free but you are limited in what you can do with it. The biggest limitation of the Basic Edition (in my opinion) is that you cannot open SVG files with the Basic Edition. This is why I upgraded to the Designer Edition.

When you open an SVG file in Silhouette Studio, you may notice that all the pieces are grouped together and you can click and drag it around the canvas together. This is not a bad thing. It keeps you from losing little pieces. However, you need to ungroup and separate the file into layers to be able to cut it out properly. This post gives you step-by-step instructions on how to separate an SVG into layers.

Silhouette Studio allows you to use any font that you have installed on your computer. And yes, this includes fonts that have special characters like swashes. However, not every font on your computer is the best for cutting. Learn which types of fonts are the best to use in this post. This post will teach you everything you need to know about using fonts and editing text in Silhouette Studio.

Script fonts are super popular but there is an extra step that you have to do in the software in order for script fonts to cut correctly. You have to weld the letters together. I learned this one the hard way and piecing vinyl letters together because you forgot a step is no fun. Check out this tutorial all about the weld tool.

The offset tool is great to use is you have a thin font that you want to make a bit thicker. It can also be used to place a border around an image when you are creating stickers. A third way that the offset tool can be used is to create a silhouette of your entire design so you can layer pieces on top. Learn all about how to use the offset tool here.

I hope this post has given you a good overview of how to use the Silhouette Studio. I plan to link more tutorials to this post as I write them so be sure to check back every once in a while for more. If you found this post useful, please consider sharing it!

I've been having a terrible time with SVG files imported into Silhouette Studio from Affinity Designer when trying to create cut files of my designs. I've searched read the threads here on the issue. The one thread the characterizes my exact issue is found here: -svg-export/

I've tried all of the suggestions on the forum and it seems that Affinity Designer SVGs are the only files having this issue with Silhouette. The PDF option allows the entire design to import but there is always the issue with separating elements for cutting as well as proportion or sizing issues.

I am still struggling with this issue myself. PDFs are much preferable to SVG as far as losing format. At one point I had tried saving from AD as an SVG, then opening that in iDraw, and ressaving it and opening it in SSDE. That was much better, but a rather cumbersome work around.

I am not sure where the trouble lies. Ideally, I would still love to have the plugin to cut directly from AD. The Silhouette software is being updated, and is greatly improved since Version 2, but I love Affinity!

I do agree AD is simply awesome software. I really, really enjoy using it. My wife loves her Silhouette software, cutting machines, and embroidery machines. I haven't used iDraw before and I don't really want to go back to Ai specifically for creating graphics for her. I really wish someone from Serif could shed light on this. I'll do what needs to be done, even if the workaround is a bit cumbersome and a bit redundant for some of the tasks.

Thanks again. Please, if you do find a good workaround, gain more insight into the issue or anything along these lines, I'd appreciate a tag in the forum if you post about so that I can keep in the know as well.

Without any experience in the Silhouette software, but some knowledge of SVG and raster/vector issues and the information in @Busenitz's example (excellent selection of sample steps!), it looks like it might be possible in AD with a little more preparation work to simplify the situation - in effect, to create vector silhouettes for Silhouette Studio.

The disappearing shape looks like a layer order problem in that example - SVG does not specify depth, so it might be easy to have shapes present but out of order, depending on the SVG file and the interpreting program. Depending on surrounding transforms, groups, and other SVG tags, a program that does not support the full SVG specification might also have trouble recognising that a shape exists inside a tag it does not recognise.

3. Probably not necessary, but I'm paranoid: If more than one rasterised layer for any single cutting shape, merge them. So the upper right circle shape, potentially merge the white circle down onto the outer texture layer.

So, in your example, you have two circular vector cutting shapes, one rectangular vector cutting shape, one "ribbon"-shaped vector cutting shape, and absolutely everything else is a bitmap layer "inside" each corresponding vector shape.

I have had mixed success in opening in Silhouette SVG files created in Designer. The ones I've created have been relatively simple stencils. I couldn't open any svg files in an earlier version of Silhouette, but since I upgraded to version 4.1, some svg files do open. I don't know why some open and others don't.

Superhashi - thanks for the suggestion, but I am creating files that might have up to 6 different vectors, filled with different bitmaps. Your work around would be better suited if I had less objects in one file.

I do think some of it is on Silhouette's end as if I create a PDF with a vector containing a bitmap (JPG) and a bitmap with transparency (PNG), the PDF shows correctly in most other apps, but Silhouette will subtract the base JPG from where the transparency is in the PNG.

Thanks, Superhaschi. I also saved my file as a jpeg and then was able to use Silhouette's trace function. I wanted to create a stencil with the asemic writing and could do so from the jpg file. But it's good to know why the svg file didn't work.

I am wondering about exporting everything as separate PNGs, that would be simple, but if they are rasterized, wouldn't I have to trace them once imported into SSDE? Their trace feature is nice, but not as accurate as a vector in my experience.

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