Posts tagged ‘svg’
Class of 2013 free SVG
In honor of my niece, and by request, I’m posting the 2013 version of my “class of” SVG. Hope you enjoy the file and congrats to all your graduates!
Click here to download in SVG format
Click here to download in .studio format
Terms: Free for personal and commercial use. Just don’t sell the file in digital form. Please share the link to this post, rather than the file itself. Thank you!
CAS spinner card and template
In January, I took the Clean and Simple Cards 2 class at onlinecardclasses.com. I really enjoyed it, and am just now getting around to doing some of my homework cards. On of the big plusses of the class was getting to see what others in the class were making, and that’s how I found this great spinner card design from Stephanie at Pink Star Creations.
Stephanie’s card (shown above) uses the spinner card dies from Paper Trey Ink, but I created mine (top of page) with Silhouette Studio. (If you don’t have a Silhouette, you can still use the template with your PTI die and the free version of Silhouette Studio.)
As you can see, I lifted Stephanie’s design pretty much completely, except that I used a “real” paper airplane where she used a stamp, (which was our class assignment that day.) My template also includes a paper airplane digistamp if you’d rather use that. It will probably hold up better in an envelope, for instance.
If you aren’t familiar with spinner cards, they use a simple sandwich of some foam and 2 disks (often pennies) to travel through a slot and create a spinning element that really makes for a fun card.
What I love about this idea, and turning it into a Silh Studio template, is that you can so quickly change it up for a different theme. Bring in a new image, drag and drop a pattern, customize the sentiment and a new card is born.
My advice is to keep this template on your hard drive instead of in your SS library. When you want to use it, open it, immediately do a “Save As…” and rename it. That way the original is preserved, as well as all the placement on the mat, which you lose when you use the library. I’ve also included instructions in the margins of the files as shown in the screen capture below.
Download the Silhouette Studio template here.
Download the SVG template here.
Here are a couple more cards I made with the same template and artwork from Lettering Delights. The first one uses a bee from the Bugaboo set and a honeycomb image, from the Reindeer Games paper pack, oddly enough. (I did have to change the colors from reds to golden yellows.) For the monkey card I used an image and pattern from the Monkey Around collection.
All of my cards, and a few extra sentiments I included on the template, feature LD Cotton Candy font.
Special thanks to Stephanie for the great card and for giving me permission to share the template based on it!
Exporting vector content to SSDE with a Mac
Silhouette Studio Designer Edition is limited in terms of the vector file formats it can read, but by making use of an online converter, we can change popular formats such as EPS and PDF to SVG. We can also use this in conjunction with the Mac’s built in PDF generation to extract vector content from many online sources. Here’s a video to demonstrate the process.
Here are the written steps for starting with a vector PDF (this also works on a Windows machine as an alternate to “print to SVG”):
-Open or generate your printable *vector* content. (see list of suggested sources in this post)
We used Ideogram’s free online template maker for the video
-Enter your dimensions and click the Create button
-Press the Save button (disk icon). The PDF will save to your Downloads folder with the name “template”
-Go to the Misc2SVG file converter site.
-Click the Choose File button and select the PDF you just saved and click Open.
-Press the Senden button.
-Click the Download link.
-Control-click (or right click) the resultant SVG and select Save As or Save Page As.
-Enter a name and location for your file and click Save.
-From Silhouette Studio, open the SVG file you just saved.
-Click to select the SVG and then on the Cut Styles Pane click Cut. If no lines turn red, click the ungroup button one or more times and try again.
-Click the Scale button and enter 80% in the custom window. Click Apply. This will return templates from Ideogram to their exact size for cutting.
Here are the written steps for vector content that can be printed, such as from Wordle.net:
-Create your Wordle and press the Print button at the bottom of the page.
-Click the PDF button, it will pull down and then you can click Save as PDF.
-Name the file, give it a location and click the Save button.
-Go to the Misc2SVG file converter site.
-Click the Choose File button and select the PDF you just saved and click Open.
-Press the Senden button.
-Click the Download link.
-Command-click (or rightclick) the resultant SVG and select Save Page As.
-Enter a name and location for your file and click Save.
-From Silhouette Studio, open the SVG file you just saved .
-Select the SVG and on the Cut Styles Pane click Cut Edge. If no lines turn red, click the ungroup button one or more times and try again.
-Remove the background and make other edits as desired. Additional ungrouping may be necessary before you can do this.
In the video, we also drag the Wordle PDF to the mat to use for extracting colors. Select all the letters you want a certain color, then click the eye dropper and the color sample. Repeat for each color.
Exporting custom templates to SSDE (Win only)
While working on my tracing series, I was reminded just how hard it is to autotrace templates. Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to trace them? I thought, and then it hit me. I went back to a 3 year old post here and found my answer. Here’s a video that shows the process for Windows (Mac solution and alternate Windows process here).
and here are the written steps:
-Install PDF creator (free) if you have not already. Download link here
-Open or generate your printable *vector* content. (see list of suggested sources in this post)
We used Ideogram’s free online template maker for the video
-Press the print button or select print from the file menu
-Choose PDF Creator from the dropdown list of printers and click Print. (don’t worry, it isn’t really going to print)
-Name the file in the top box and click the Save button at the bottom right.
-Choose a location for your for file, choose SVG from the pull down list of file types at the bottom of the window, and click Save.
-Open a new document in SSDE and choose File>Merge, set files of type to SVG or All files then navigate to the SVG file you just saved and click OK.
-If nothing is visible on the mat, click control-A to select all and look for a bounding box. Set the line color to black.
-Select all and set line width to zero (any line widths greater than zero in an SVG will double cut)
-On the Cut Styles Pane click Cut Edge. If no lines turn red, click the ungroup button one or more times and try again.
-In order to dash or separate score lines, ungroup the file and change the lines styles as desired.
This process maintains the proper size for ideogram’s templates (in PC Creator, your default ppi under Options>SVG should be set to 72) but it’s a good idea to verify size for anything that needs to be exact before you cut.
Tip:If the file is too big, try a reduction of 80% as this is another common standard.
Stencilizer: a shortcut for diecutters
My latest web app crush is squarely on Stencilizer, a cool online tool for automatically posterizing, smoothing, vectorizing and color separating photo input. Upload an optimized (clear, close up, cropped, background removed, high contrast) image and Stencilizer first presents you with 9 choices in various brightness levels and number of colors.
Choose your favorite and then Stencilizer yields up to 5 SVG files ready to download, cut and layer.
In addition to its intended purpose of making layered stencils, I see at least 3 more ways the digital diecutting community can put this tool to use. First off, if you are familiar with the stunning Paper Portraits by Greg over at Paper Kutz Studios you may have wished for a lazy crafter’s version. Stencilizer gives you that.
The Stencilizer output is not nearly as detailed as what you would get through the meticulous methods Greg generously shares in his tutorials, of course, but should work fine for smaller projects, greeting cards, etc. Though I haven’t tried it yet, I can foresee combining the Stencilizer output with Greg’s advice on paper colors to create some nice pieces.
Secondly, rendering photos in vinyl for tiles and for etching on vases, etc is very popular. File creation has been a challenging proposition, though, as most crafters lack the image editing savvy to translate a photo into a single color cut file that is recognizable, much less flattering. While the SVG files from Stencilizer are not suitable for vinyl work, the enlarged previews it generates are adequate for tracing.
I’ve put together a video tutorial on how you can use Stencilizer to make cut files for vinyl. In it I use Silhouette Studio for the tracing, but any cutting program or Inkscape would do the job just as well if not better.
Though not diecutter related, I will mention (since it happens to be October) that you could use Stencilizer in this same manner for custom pumpkin carving designs. Assuming the black will be cut out, be sure you add “bridges” so that you don’t have any white completely surrounded by black.
Thirdly, Stencilizer works well for the posterization needed for the hatched sketch technique I recently posted and for other projects such as glitter/sand painting where areas of discreet color need to be delineated. The SVG files Stencilizer generates are meant to be stacked, so they will not work for this, as we can not have hatching layers overlap, but once again, the previews can be traced with good results.
I’ve made a video on using Stencilizer as part of the sketching process, too.
Finally, let me mention that Stencilizer’s revenue stream comes from sales of custom cut paper stencils. Since those of us with our own diecutters will not need to buy stencils, I encourage you to take advantage of Stencilizer’s donate button if you find the web app useful.
Cool online tool for diecutters and other font lovers
If you follow this blog you know I love web apps and I am always on the lookout for new and cool ones. Mariairie left me a comment a couple of days ago with a link to IcoMoon, an icon font generator for web developers. At first I didn’t understand it or see any application for us diecutters, but the more I played the more excited I got. Here are some things you can do with IcoMoon:
Easily export all or selected glyphs in a font to individual SVG files.
- Go to Free Font Converter, browse for your font and set the “…format to convert to” to SVG and click the big blue Convert button. An SVG font with the same name as your TTF will be downloaded to your computer (SVG fonts carry the .svg extension, just like a single SVG image)
- Click the Import Icons button in IcoMoon and select the SVG font that you just generated. You will see all the glyphs from that font appear under “Your Custom Icons”
- Click on the glyphs you would like to export to SVG. Selected glyphs will be outlined in yellow. To select multiples at once, click on the first and then hold down the shift key while clicking on the last one you want to select
- Click the Images button. A zipped folder containing SVG versions of each glyph you selected will be downloaded to your computer. How cool is that?! Perfect for creating a specialized alphabet or for sorting images from a mixed theme dingbat font, among other uses we haven’t imagined yet.
Create a personal favorites dingbats font.
- Go to Free Font Converter and convert each of the source fonts to SVG as shown in step 1 above.
- Import your first font into IcoMoon as shown in step 2 above, select the glyphs you definitely do NOT want and press the trash can icon to delete them
- Repeat this process with successive fonts until all your favorite glyphs appear under “Your Custom Icons”
- Select the glyphs that make the final cut for your favorites font
- Click the Font button
- Type a character in the top box above each glyph and/or drag and drop glyphs to set their encoding (which key you will type to access each glyph)
- Click the gear/flower icon and type a name for your font in the box and click the X to save it. (choose carefully as internal font names are not easily changed)
- Click the Save button. A zipped folder containing TTF and SVG versions of the compilation font will be downloaded to your computer
Note: The key word here is personal. Use these “mix” fonts on your own computer only. Please don’t use this technique to redistribute copyrighted fonts/glyphs/images.
Make your own dingbat font.
- In Inkscape, Adobe Illustrator or other vector editor, create a set of SVGs you would like to compile into a font. (I am still experimenting with the format but starting using a 512 x 512 pixel high document seems to work.)
- In IcoMoon, click the Import Icons button and navigate to your SVGs and import them.
- Click and/or shift-click to highlight all of the SVGs which are now showing under “Your Custom Icons”
- Click the Font button
- Type a character in the top box above each glyph and/or drag and drop glyphs to set their encoding (which key you will type to access each glyph)
- Click the gear/flower icon and type a name for your font in the box and click the x to save it. (choose carefully as internal font names are not easily changed)
- Click the Save button. A zipped folder containing TTF and SVG versions of the compilation font will be downloaded to your computer
Caveat: So far I have only been able to get IcoMoon to work using Chrome as a browser.
Class of 2012 free SVG
We have no grads this year, but last year’s file was so popular I decided to update. Hope you enjoy the file and congrats to all your graduates.
Click here to download in SVG format
Free Moroccan Tile Vector
I’ve created a vector version of the digipaper in my previous post. Great for a 12 x 12 background or modify it to fit a card front, etc.
Milestone for me, freebie for you
This morning I completed my first athletic endurance event, an Olympic distance “AquaBike,” which consisted of swimming 1500 meters (almost a mile) and biking 40 kilometers (almost 25 miles). In celebration of this accomplishment I’m sharing a cut file for a triathlon bike in icon style.
Free Class of 2011 SVG
Working on some graduation things today and wanted to share this one. Click here to download the SVG
