The Write Stuff Challenge - Week 4 - Scrapbook Pages

Welcome back for week 4 of our Cricut Drawing Challenge!
This week we are focusing on Scrapbooking.

First, Lets talk about fonts

This week we are talking about using your Cricut to write or draw for scrapbook pages. We have done a lot with pre-made sentiments, drawn images, and short phrases these past few weeks. Using your Cricut to write out a section for a scrapbook can be a little more challenging that what we have covered so fat, because Cricut does not currently support font kerning.

What is kerning?

In design space, we have control over "letter Spacing". Think of each letter as an image - letter spacing is the distance from the right edge of one letter to the left edge of the next. Most fonts that you are familiar with take things a little further with "Kerning". Kerning is the adjustment of the spacing between letter pairs in order to make the font more readable and aesthetically pleasing. 

This is particularly important for heavily slanted script fonts like the one below.

(Cricut Signature Scripts Font - Catamaran)

The first line shows what the the words look like if you only adjust the letter spacing in Design Space. On the second line, I broke apart the words into letters and moved individual letters (manual kerning) to get the spacing right. You can see how far I needed to move the letter T for it to look good at the beginning of the word "The". This might be reasonable if you are just writing a word or two, but if you are writing a whole paragraph, it's typically not desirable to have to move each letter to get the spacing correct. 

What should I do?

Don't let this scare you away from writing large blocks of text though! There are many fonts in DS that look good without the need for kerning. Many of the non-script fonts work well! Here are a few of my favorites that don't need kerning enabled to look good:

For the best results on with these fonts use the following font spacings:

Awesome (Set font spacing to 1.0)

Be Mine (Set font spacing to 0.5)

Chloe Whimsy (Set font spacing to 0.5)

Elfie (default font spacing of 1.2 works well)

Loop-di-loo (Set font spacing to 0)

Millennial (set font spacing to 1.5)

Zig Zag (set font spacing to 1)

You can stick with these fonts, or type out your text and try our a few others. If  there are only a few places that need tweaking, you may be able to branch out without getting overwhelmed. Just be sure you have double checked your spelling before you ungroup to letters because it's not possible to change them back to edit in a single text box.

I hope these tips are helpful! Give it a try and don't forget to share your creations with us!