About Die Cutters

Die cutters are used to cut shapes out of paper, vinyl, leather, and any other material that is flat and can be cut by a blade.

They allow you to make…

• Stencils and 2D shapes
• Foldable 3D shapes

2D stencils and designs

Foldable 3D shapes

How to create something to cut

To cut something with the die cutter, you can do one of two things:

1. Use the Die-Cutting software to make very basic designs (Vinylmaster)
2. Use a vector drawing tool to make more intricate designs:
   1. Adobe Illustrator ($ subscription)
   2. Affinity Designer ($ one time cost)
   3. Inkscape (free open source)

For the purposes of this tutorial, we will be using Inkscape.

Step 1 - Downloading and Using Inkscape to Create Your Design

1. Download and install Inkscape
   1. Inkscape is a free, open source vector drawing program

<aside> 💡 Vector Drawing means that the program draws lines and shapes using vectors aka mathematical representations. You don’t need to do any math— they do it for you, but there is math “under the hood”.

The other kind of drawing is Raster Drawing, which means drawing with pixels. Programs like Adobe Photoshop, ProCreate, and others use this kind of drawing.

Only Vector Drawings can be read by Die Cutting machines.

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<aside> ❓ I’m on a Mac, how do I know whether to download Intel or ARM64 (aka Apple Silicon)

Use this website to determine which installer to use: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211814

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1. If you are unfamiliar with Inkscape or Vector Drawing, we recommend watching this tutorial:

   1. This will introduce you to the basics
   2. You don’t need to know everything in this tutorial for die-cutting, but it covers many good useful key ideas

   Logo Design Tutorial on the Inkscape website

2. Go ahead an design something simple that you would like to cut.