If you are new to your Silhouette CAMEO or Portrait, these simple tips will help you understand the basics of working with text in Silhouette Studio so that you will be able to cut words out with ease and leave the frustration behind. Â Included are tips and tricks on choosing your font, working with script fonts, welding to eliminate unwanted cut lines, grouping your text, text spacing,and creating outlines of your text for multilayer projects.
Learning how to design well with text is one of the best things you can do to open up a world of projects to be created!  You can use text to make everything from shirts with heat transfer, to cutting vinyl for coffee mugs, yeti cups, and water bottles, to making wooden pallet or canvas signs.  The options are endless!  We are about to dive in, but before we start a couple of things I want to make sure you know!  You can see all of my Silhouette tutorials and project inspiration here.  Also to make sure you have all the important Silhouette info and freebies when you need them, do these two important things:
- Sign up for my Crafty Newsletter!  This will deliver all crafting posts including each new Silhouette 101 tutorial right to your inbox as they are released, so you don’t miss a thing! SIGN UP HERE!
- Pin the Silhouette 101 page to your Silhouette or craft board on Pinterest (and make sure to follow me while you are there!) My Silhouette 101 post is a library of all the beginner tutorials I post. Â Now, if you are crafting and have questions, you have an easy place to find this post and a place to reference for all of your questions! Â You can repin the Silhouette 101 pin here!
Best Beginner Tips for Designing Text to Cut with your Silhouette CAMEO
When I started as a newbie with my Silhouette CAMEO in hand, almost all of the first projects I did involved cutting text out. Â Luckily, Silhouette Studio (the software program you use with your CAMEO or Portrait) is really great for designing text in. Â There are a few little tips and tricks to know that will help alleviate some major frustration as you get started and I am excited to share them with you today here in the post and in a video where I walk through each step. Â If you have questions after everything, leave them in the comments! I am happy to help!
Tip 1: Â How to pick your font
One of the best features of Silhouette Studio is that you can use any font that you have on your computer! Â It might actually be the worst feature since I now have a ton of fonts installed so that I have limitless design options ha! Â You can see my tips on where to find free or cheap fonts here.
With all the fonts that come on your computer plus any you might add, it can be hard to sort through them all to figure out what you want to use for each project. Â My best tip? Use the website Wordmark.it to see the word you want to cut in all of your fonts at once!
Just type in your word at the top of the screen and then hit load fonts and it will load all of them for you side by side! Â I talk about a couple of other little tricks with the website in the video so make sure to watch!
Tip 2: Weld Overlapping Letters
When you have script (cursive) fonts that you want to cut, you will notice that if you zoom in on the letters that there are cut lines around each of the letters individually instead of just having the cutline around the outside of the entire word.  In almost all cases you won’t want the letters to cut out individually in a script font, but you will want one continuous cut around the entire word.
The way you do this is to type your word, then right click on it and go down to the menu option Weld.  You will see the lines between each of the individual letters disappear and leave one continuous line around the word remaining.  The weld function takes any cutlines that are overlapping and “welds” them together or merges them to just leave the outer cut lines so it is a really useful function.
The weld function is only needed when letters are overlapping, so it primarily used for script fonts but from time to time you might use it on a standard font as well if there is overlap in characters, or you can adjust the character spacing as we talk about in the next tip!
Tip 3: Adjust Character & Line Spacing
The next tip for working with fonts is to know how and when to adjust your character and line spacing.  I frequently use character (letter) spacing for a couple of reasons.  Sometimes when you write the script fonts you will notice that the individual letters in the word can be a tad to close resulting in too much overlap when you weld, or a bit too far apart where they aren’t quite overlapping and then they won’t weld.  IMPORTANT NOTE:  You will need to do this BEFORE welding your letters together as we discussed in the step above.
For both of these instances we will adjust the character spacing.  You can use the slider or get a bit more exact by typing in the exact spacing you want in the character spacing section in the text window on the right of your screen.  If you increase the spacing the letters will move farther apart or reduce the spacing and they will move closer together.
This is not only helpful on cursive style lettering, but also on standard print fonts. Â At times it makes more sense for the spacing of the letters to be closer or you will find that even though the font is not cursive that it still overlaps on some letters. Â If that happens you can just adjust the spacing wider and it will allow you not have them overlap.
Line spacing will have the same effect except with lines instead of individual letters.  So if you type two lines of text in one text box, it will allow you to move the lines further apart or closer together. Honestly though, I rarely ever use this.  I find that it is much more flexible to just put text you want on different lines into different text boxes so that you have the ability to move or manipulate them any way you want. See… you have options!
Tip 4: Group Your Letters
Once you weld your letters together, resize them, or change them, changes are they will now be individual instead of being stuck together like they were originally. Â What I mean by this is if you look at the word Dance in the example, the D is not connected to the ance, which is one piece after welding. Â If you try to reposition or move the word on your screen, then when you grab one piece of it it will not move with the other. Â So if you grabbed on to the “ance” it would move but the D would be left behind. Â This is a very easy fix though, and one I recommend getting in the habit of doing so that you can keep your text lines perfect.
What you will do to group your text is just drag your mouse across the entire word to make sure that all letters in the word are selected, in this example, the “D” and the “ance” pieces are both selected. Then right click the box and select group. Â Now if you grab the word, all pieces of the word will move together. Â If you decide you want to edit or change a letter, for example make the first letter bigger, then you can right click the word again and choose ungroup.
Tip 5: How to Outline Your Text
I wanted to include this one since it is an effect I absolutely love and is really easy to do, but not so easy to figure out how to do when you don’t know the correct terminology. Â Outlining your text is done by using the Offset feature in the software. Â I have a detailed post on How to Outline Your Text in Silhouette Studio here, or you can see my step by step in the video!
Well that is it for tips today! Â Hopefully this gets you pretty far along on the way to designing with text! Â The sky is the limit for projects with text. Â I would love to see your creations! Â Tag me on your pic on Instagram so I can see @thepinningmama! Â And if you still have questions feel free to leave them in the comments below! Â I love hearing from readers… it makes my day to get a comment and I read each and every one.
Melanie Lashua says
Thank you so much for the tips!
Kimber says
You are so welcome Melanie! I hope they help!
Deirdre J Designs says
This was a great video. Thank you. That font choosing website alone is priceless. Such a time saver.
Giulia says
Thank you for this tutorial, very helpful! May I ask the name of the font you used for “Tips for Text”? Thank you again!
Kimber says
No problem! It was Botanica Script https://crmrkt.com/q0lOK
Joan M says
Loving these tips – thank you so very much!!!! I’m finding your tutorials very helpful.
Kimber says
Thanks so much Joan! Let me know if you have requests!
Alanna says
Hi! This may be silly, but how do you edit the font/size, after you have already clicked off of the word? When I click on my word, the right edit side of the font section is faded out not allowing me to click on anything.
Thanks so much! All of your videos/posts are so helpful!
-Alanna
Karen says
I really appreciated this 5 tips for text. I have been doing quite a bit, but clearly doing it the hard way OR not knowing a couple steps. Thank you so much and I am following you on Pinterest now!
Kimber says
Thanks Karen- It is so good to hear it was helpful for you!!
Annie says
I often get frustrated when I have chosen a font, changed font size, etc and then I click somewhere on the page and it resets back to the default font/size. Is there a way to make these changes and then not have to reset the options when I want to create lettering elsewhere on the page?
Susan says
Hello. Thank you for the informative tutorial on text in Silhoue space.
I am trying to sketch text without an outline, but all my fonts are showing up in an outline style in the space and are printing to the silhouette that way, taking it twice as long to print text. Your Big and Micah in your Big Brother Micah example is what I am looking for, but everything comes out outlined. I may have accidentally selected some setting I can’t seem to figure out how to undo. Can you help me get back to single line text please?
Tasha Myrick says
Hello! Your post is helpful!! I just bought my silhouette cameo and am learning as I go. I want to monogram names on the back of a paddle brush for my daughters cheer team. I am struggling with trying to figure out which kind of vinyl to buy for that. Are there brands or types that are better than others? I want the names to be as permanent as possible. ?
Thanks in advance for your help!
Jodi Fisher says
I don’t feel nearly as intimated as I did before watching and reading this! Thank you so much!!
Chris says
Hi, hope you can hel0. I am new to all this and I’m trying to find out how to make and outline cut around a word or object. Can you please help me?
Kimber says
Hi Chris- I have a post all about this here: http://www.thepinningmama.com/outlined-text-with-silhouette-cameo-tutorial/. You should also check out my Silhouette Boot Camp lessons here: http://www.thepinningmama.com/silhouette-boot-camp-20-mini-lessons-on-how-to-use-your-silhouette-cameo/. Hope that helps!