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…
2D stencils and designs
Foldable 3D shapes
To cut something with the die cutter, you can do one of two things:
For the purposes of this tutorial, we will be using Inkscape.
<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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If you are unfamiliar with Inkscape or Vector Drawing, we recommend watching this tutorial:
Go ahead an design something simple that you would like to cut.