The struggle bus that is... in Cricut Adventures from a Designer's Perspective

…Design Space.

I switched gears last night to what I thought would be a much simpler project: engraving some text on five 2.5”x.5” inch .6mm thick brass plates (or aluminum if the brass proves to be too hefty.) Each plate I have is 3”x3” so it remains to be seen if it will actually CUT this plate into five pieces.

No real need to set this up in Illustrator, I figured. Just use Design Space, right? It’s just five squares with about 7 lines of text. Super easy.

Until you start using Design Space. The simplest actions are just so…wonky! Designer brain kept kicking in, and I kept wanting to hold alt+click+drag to duplicate a layer. Silly design brain! This is craft central! We are much simpler here. All you need is ctrl+C and ctrl+V, and we’ll slap it on your board wherever we want! Then you can move it.

Here are the oddities I ran into:

• backspace doesn’t work when I’m typing text into the edit box. Wtf?
• the text edit box pops up in all kinds of random places rather than next to the text I’m editing. Is it because I was zoomed in?
• the layer controls for some layers would randomly be drawn nowhere NEAR the actual boundaries of the layer I was editing
• the attributes on 2 separate layers were only updating one of those layers. Unless I changed its layer order.
• loading the project this morning had three of my text layers displaying on the artboard as CUT layers instead of SCORE layers, even though their attributes were set to SCORE
• The fonts are so crafty. (This is not a compliment.) So use your system fonts! You can, you know. Yes, I know, but then I’m relegated to outlines since none of my system fonts have a “writing style” which is needed to avoid outlined text. Le sigh.
• Brace for more. I’m about to attempt running this thing if I can figure out how to get the boxes to cut where I placed them on my artboard.

SOME TIME LATER
Nope. Didn’t even come close to cutting through. The scoring didn’t even scratch through the black coating. The cutting looked more like scoring, and the scoring looks more like an afterthought of text.

Disappointed once again.

I suppose I can try to find something much thinner than .6mm, or just order these plates already sized to what I need, and engrave them with the engraving tip I just ordered. Probably the latter. So I can still make it work I think; just can’t do what I was hoping it could do.