How to Create a Writing Font for Your Cricut in Adobe Illustrator (Beginner Tutorial)

This is one of three tutorials on how to create a writing font for your Cricut. This tutorial is for absolute beginners, the next will be for mid-level users, and the last will be for more advanced creators.

Note: this is not a tutorial on how to create a writing font as a font file like .otf, but rather how to make an SVG file that your Cricut will read as a drawing file.

This isn’t just for creating fonts, though! You can create any drawing files for your cutting machine using this method.

Step One: Choose a font

We’re going to need to choose a font to turn into a writing font. For this tutorial, I am going to be using Braisetto.

Step Two: Outline Your Font

“Outline” means to expand your font, or turn it from an editable layer into a plain vector graphic. To do this, either select the type with the selection tool (shortcut “V”) and use the shortcut “Ctrl+Shift+o” (“Cmd+Shift+o) or go “Type” and then “Create Outlines”.

Now, our font is going to look like this:

For this, we’re going to work in outline mode. Outline mode in Adobe Illustrator shows us just the paths without any fills, effects, or weight to them.

To enter outline mode, the shortcut for that is “Ctrl+Y” (“Cmd+Y”).

This is what your screen should look like now.

This also shows us what would happen if our Cricut was going to draw the file. See how it’s a bubble font? That’s what the pen would draw. This is how we know for certain we’re doing it correctly.

Step Three: Create a new layer

In the top right, click on the layers panel. If you don’t have that on your screen, just go “Window”, and then find “Layers”.

To create a new layer, click that plus sign with a square in it at the bottom.

You can name your layers by double-clicking on the text of the layer name.

I’m going to name my layers to make things easier for myself.

And then I’m going to lock the layer that has the outlined font on it. I’m doing that by clicking the empty space between the eye and the colour of the layer.

This makes it so that I don’t accidentally click onto the layer and start editing it. This wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, and it’s very fixable if this happens, but it’s inconvenient so locking the original layer is best.

Make sure your writing layer is the one selected (highlighted in blue) before we start.

Step Four: Start drawing

We’re going to be using the pen tool, but we’re only going to be creating straight lines with it.

To get to the pen tool, either click it from the toolbar, or use the shortcut “P” to find it.

Zoom in on your text, like this:

You can zoom in even further, and I do when I’m working, but I’m keeping this zoomed out for clarity.

Then, start creating your path. You’re going to just click — not click and drag like you may have seen other people do using this tool. We’re creating a series of straight lines with the pen tool that follow the shape of our letters.

When you’ve reached the edge of your screen, just hold down spacebar and click and drag to navigate. When you let go of spacebar, your tool reverts back to the pen tool and doesn’t break the path you’re drawing.

And if you do accidentally click out of the tool, just go back to it, select the end of the path, and keep drawing. It will reconnect automatically.

When you’ve finished your letter, you can either hit “Escape” or “V” which will bring you back to the selection tool.

This letter has a lot of detail, so we need to fix that. Those dots along my letter W are called anchor points, and the more of those we have, the more data there is for the Cricut to read. So, let’s clean it up.

Click off your layer by clicking the background, and then click onto it again. There’s a bit of a bug in Illustrator where we need to deselect it and reselect it if we were doing a task immediately beforehand, otherwise, the next tool does not work properly.

Then, right-click your writing and select “Simplify”.

Play around with the slider until you’re happy with the number of anchor points vs how it looks. You’re basically reaching a compromise between the lowest number of anchor points and the visuals of the letter.

Now, Illustrator has taken those jagged pen movements and turned them into a lovely curve.

When you’re happy, just click off the letter.

Step Five: Edit your paths

With this next letter, I’m not happy with the simplify results, so I’m going to tweak it a bit.

I’m going to use the direct selection tool (not to be confused with the selection tool), which has the shortcut A.

And then I’m going to select the point I want to fix:

The anchor point I’ve selected is highlighted red, while the others are left with a red outline. There’s also now a circle with a red dot next to that anchor point. We’re going to click that and drag it.

Clicking it and dragging it turns that corner into a curve. I’m going to go ahead and do that to the other point I see.

And now my letters look right, and I can keep going.

I finished my ‘i’ and now we have a new problem:

The ‘r’ and the ‘i’ are crossing over a little, and I don’t want that. Now, I could move the ‘i’ to match the edge of the ‘r’, but that shifts the ‘i’ out of alignment with the letter I’m copying, so instead we’re going to edit the ‘r’.

Just hit A to get to the direct selection tool, then select the end of the ‘r’ and drag it to match up to the ‘i’.

You might see some magenta lines or words come up on your screen, which are just Illustrator’s “smart guides” telling you that you’re properly aligned.

When you release that anchor point, your ‘r’ will not match up with the ‘i’.

You can also click the eye in your layers panel to hide your original layer and see how your writing is looking.

Step Six: Finish your letters

If at any point you’re unhappy with a step you just made, just use Ctrl+Z to go back a step and keep drawing with the pen tool.

Looking good! But we’re not finished yet.

When we exit outline mode (just by hitting Ctrl+Y again), it’s going to look a bit cursed.

This won’t make a difference to how it works, but to make it a bit nicer for ourselves we’re going to fix it.

Click and drag to select all of your writing font, and then hit “Shift+X”. This swaps the stroke and the fill around.

Much prettier.

We’re still not done, though.

Step Seven: Prepare your file to import into Cricut Design Space.

Cricut is going to view each individual line as a separate object, which won’t work for a writing font. It’ll just put them anywhere on your canvas, not neatly lay them out to look like letters. So, we need to make this a compound path.

You can either make your arrangement in Illustrator and do one compound path, or you can make each word its own compound path and arrange it in Cricut Design Space.

I’m going to make my arrangement in Illustrator, because I prefer to only use Cricut Design Space purely to cut, not create, but you choose whatever method works best for you.

To make your file a compound path, click and drag around the words and then go “Object”, “Compound Path”, “Make”.

Groups exist in Adobe Illustrator and other vector programs, but it doesn’t read the same way as it does in Cricut Design Space, but a compound path will all stay together.

Then, we can export it. Just go File, then Save As, and make sure you select SVG from the dropdown.

And you're done! Now you can use this file just like the drawing files you can find in Cricut Access.