How To Download Cricut Design Space On Desktop

[Samantha Figueredo]

This is my first time opening Designer so I don't know what I'm doing. I imported a mandala design that was supposedly an SVG but it had a white background when I tried importing it into Cricut Design Space. I knew that I could use the eraser tool in Affinity Designer so I imported it and started erasing away. I worked on it for several hours over a two-day period and saved the file as an SVG. Just tried importing it again into Cricut's Design Space and got a blank screen with the message that it doesn't support clipping paths. I'm at a standstill now. I searched the forum and found another person who had the same problem and I tried the suggestion of unticking the Set View box in the Export window, but that didn't help. I'm attaching a screen shot of my file if that helps any with giving me some pointers. I don't even know how to resize the image--that's how little I know about AD right now. I just knew how to erase the white background! Go easy on me. I will learn it eventually but I want to get this done.

If it truly is raster and it's only the white you want to get rid of you don't need to spend hours erasing.
In Designer you just need to change the blend ranges to look something like the image below....
You can try different ramp configurations. The important part is have the right most node at the bottom.
(this is just one option among several to get this done.)

I didn't want to get rid of the white inside the shell. Wouldn't that make the inside of the shell transparent as well? I already spent the time erasing the white background, which is no big deal. My problem now is that the Cricut Design Space is telling me that it doesn't support clipping paths. I don't know what to do to work around that. Is there a way to flatten my image (not that I even know what that is; I've just heard that term before.)? The image needs to be an SVG file for the Cricut. In the end, I will be cutting this design out of vinyl to give you an idea of what I need it for. The white part inside the shell will be weeded away, leaving only the black parts.

I am going to load it on my Cricut and cut it on vinyl and make a decal out of it. The hard part will be weeding all the dead space out of this! I don't know what I'm getting myself into. I have lots more of these files where this came from that I want to try if this works.

Ok, for future reference EPS, PDF AI and SVG are the ones to download, these are or can contain vector graphics, I'd start with SVG if available, then EPS, you'll probably find that EPS is the vector file offered most.

I'm going to be logging off for a while to fix dinner and I have a friend stopping by this evening. Don't want you to think I'm abandoning you. I appreciate everyone pitching in to try to solve my problem. I'll pick up again a little later tonight when you all will probably be sleeping, as you are 5 hours ahead of my in Florida, USA.

The image is probably unusable for your purposes, short of tracing over it you don't have many options here. I'll run it through a tracing app I have to see if I can get something workable. I'll be going to sleep soon so I'll have to catch up tomorrow. Enjoy your meal.

I just wanted to let everyone know that I was able to upload the image into Cricut Design Space and I clicked on each individual space in the design to make it transparent and it worked out. It's not the best solution because it was a tedious job clicking on each of those spaces and I would love to know how to do it the right way. But I didn't want anyone to go to the trouble of working through a solution for me when I got the job done for the time being. I need to sit down one day and learn the program for sure. Here's the final graphic in Design Space, nice and clean. Thanks again for your offer of assistance. I hope this project works out after all of this. If not, I'll just print the image. I really like it.

Update: I posted in the Cricut Facebook group and they suggested I upload the image in a free SVG converter (I used picsvg). It worked great and I was able to upload the image into Cricut Design Space. For a test, I took that SVG into AD and tried erasing the halo around the shell and re-saving it as an SVG. At that point Cricut Design Space rejected it saying it doesn't support clipping. Very strange. The only thing I did was erase the halo and resave it. So there must be some setting I need to change in AF on export is all. I will fiddle with it more but I'm happy with the SVG converter in the meantime. But, on the other hand, I also tried weeding a small portion of my image and oh my, what a nightmare. Image attached (ashamed at how horrible it looks!). I may have to enlarge the image twice the size to be able to weed this baby. It will take a whole lot of patience. If all else fails, I will be printing this instead of my original plan. Again, thanks everyone for your assistance. If you can think of what I need to change in my export settings, let me know. I've kept them default.

Having dabbled with a cricut a couple of times back in the day (prior to them supporting eps/svg and when surecutsalot wasnt sued), I know what you're trying to do. But as firstdefence said, you need the EPS. In this case EPS can be scaled to any size you want while maintaining perfect quality. As you see, this is a complicated cut because you're cutting thin lines that might break easily once you peel it off. And also you have those circles with the dots that muck things up too. Looks like you forgot to delete the white space of the "donut" and that's why it only cut out the larger shape (unless you just haven't removed that section when you took the photo.

I'm super new to Affinity Designer, and I've been going through everything I can think of to make an SVG and I was curious how you got it to work on Affinity to upload it to Cricut Design. Was your original work on Affinity? Or did you import a jpeg/png and work from there?

I am happy to share all of the Cricut Design Space fix information I discovered. Since Cricut Design Space is a software program, often when there is an update to update one thing it will end up breaking something else.

Why is this? Because the programmers at Cricut cannot possibly test their software for every combination of devices and operating systems out there. Plus we all have different programs and applications on our devices that might block something Design Space is trying to do.

Sometimes the Cricut Design Space fix is an easy one, such as you cannot get past the Cricut Design Space login page. Here are some of the first things to try any time that Cricut Design Space is not working.

In July 2024 I experienced an issue where when I tried to open up Design Space it would just continually open up a new tab, instead of the project I was trying to open. I had to delete the Design Space software from my computer and then re-install it from the Cricut website.

With the February 2021 update that was done to Cricut Design Space some users, including myself, were having trouble opening anything in Design Space. This included formerly created and saved projects. Cricut put out a statement with a fix for this that you can read HERE.

The Cricut Design Space fix for this problem is Clearing Application Cache. I had no idea how to do this myself, but I found the directions from Cricut very easy to follow. Please click HERE to read and follow the directions from Cricut.

Some Cricut users are asking if clearing the application cache for Cricut Design Space cause them to lose any fonts that they have from sites like DaFont. The answer to this is no, you will not lose your fonts.

Any fonts that you downloaded and installed from sites like DaFont are installed on the device you are working with, whether that is your computer, iPad or phone. They are a part of that operating system and are not stored in Design Space. This is why they show up under System Fonts when you open Design Space.

Another question is will I lose my images and svg files that I have uploaded to Design Space by clearing the application cache. The answer to that is no, you will not. This is because when you upload an image or a svg to Design Space you save it to the cloud. The cloud is on the Cricut server so once you are back in Design Space you will be able to access them again.

In Cricut Design Space next to fonts and images you may have seen an option that says Download. If you have downloaded an image or a font in this manner, you will not lose it. Cricut Design Space is a program and when you download images or fonts they are not saved to your computer. Downloading them just makes them available for you to access if you are working with Design Space offline.

Here is a great example of working with Cricut Design Space offline. Pretend you are going on a long trip and will not have internet connect while traveling, maybe while you are on the airplane. If you download all of the images and fonts you know you will need for designing a project before getting on the plane, you will be able to use them to create projects while you are on the plane.

You will know you are working offline in Design Space because you will see the word Offline in the upper left corner of the screen. The only thing you cannot do while offline is upload images and fonts that are not already in your Design Space account.

What about saved projects, will I lose those? Once again, the answer is no. Your saved projects are also saved to the cloud so they are nice and safe on the Cricut server. If you go into Settings, you can bypass this. You would have to change the default settings to computer only. So unless you know you have done that, you are safe and you will not lose your projects.

In early 2024, some users began to notice that if you used the Contour button to remove sections of your design, as I do when I create layers, the overally bounding box around the design will stay large. It is as if the software is holding on to the memory of how big the image used to be. This can be a problem if you are using Contour to take pieces out of a design and make the pieces small enough to fix on a standard cutting mat.

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