How To Get Fonts On Cricut

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Want to truly customize all your Cricut crafts and projects? Learn how to upload all your favorite fonts on your computer to Cricut Design Space! It's easy and gives you a ton of flexibility when creating your Cricut designs.

Want to truly customize all your Cricut crafts and projects? Learn how to upload fonts to Cricut Design Space! It's easy and gives you a ton of flexibility when creating your Cricut designs.

This post is sponsored by FontBundles.net

Who here also love fonts? I love fonts like a cat lady loves cats. I tend to be fairly minimalistic in most areas of my life, but the font folder on my computer suggests otherwise—1284 fonts.

That's not crazy, right? Tell me I'm not crazy.

One of the reasons I love fonts so much is that my hand-lettering game isn't all that great. I'm working on it and I'm learning more and more every day, but it's so much easier to be able to grab a font and put it right into one of my projects. Script fonts, block fonts, quirky fonts—I love and use them all!

Today we're going to talk about how to use your own fonts in Cricut Design Space. Cricut Design Space has a ton of free Cricut fonts, but often you may want to use your own fonts (called "System Fonts" in Cricut Design Space). Let's check out how to do it.

Where to Find Fonts to Use On Your Cricut

First of all, where can you find new and free fonts for the Cricut? In the past, I just downloaded free fonts wherever I could find them online. But this came with one big problem. Often I didn't know if I could use those fonts on products I sell, like the SVG files in my shop.

Some fonts had commercial licenses, some didn't, and some had licenses that were somewhere in between. Some fonts had a commercial license listed on one site and not on another. It was a mess. Additionally, often free fonts are poorly designed, so I spent a lot of time frustrated with letter spacing, kerning, and other font design issues.

Now I almost exclusively purchase my fonts. First of all, I believe font designers deserve to be paid for their work. Second, I like purchasing my fonts when I know they have a commercial license attached—that way I can use them in my own files and not have to worry about breaking any licensing agreements.

My favorite place to purchase fonts is from FontBundles.net. They have enormous font bundles every month or so that are at hugely discounted prices. The current Fantastic Fonts II bundle costs just $19 and you get $315 worth of fonts! 40 fonts from 20 different font families. And all of them have commercial licenses attached, so I can use them in my design work for sale!

My favorites in this bundle for Cricut designs are Gorgeous, History, and Bold Brush, though almost all of them will cut perfectly on your machine.

Fantastic Font Bundle via FontBundles.net — image via fontbundles.net

I also love professionally designed fonts like those found at FontBundles.net because they are better designed and they often come with alternate characters (also called stylistic alternates, glyphs or in some cases, ligatures). For instance, there may be three different styles of the capital A, or several styles of a double "tt," or a bunch of swashes that you can use to customize your projects even more. Learn more about using alternate characters in Cricut Design Space!

You can totally up your Cricut design game when you have more options in your font folder!

How to Upload Fonts to Cricut Design Space

Before you start to use your fonts within Cricut Design Space you need to get those fonts onto your computer! If you've already installed your fonts on your computer, you can skip to the next step.

Your font (or fonts, if you buy a bundle) will be in the new unzipped folder. Often there will be two versions of the font, one that ends with .ttf (a TrueType font) and .otf (an OpenType Font). For technical reasons I won't go into here, I suggest going with the .otf font if it's available (it's just a more robust font type). If there's only a .ttf, that's fine too!

We'll go through installing fonts on a Mac and PC, and then how to open them in Design Space.

Step 1a: Install the Font On Your Mac

When you download a font, it will most likely come in a zip folder. Click on the zip folder to unzip the file. Then select the three fonts and ctrl+click to bring up the menu. Then select Open With > Font Book.

A box will pop up for you to install your fonts (if you choose to install all of the fonts in a bundle at once, a lot of boxes will pop up, one for each font!). Click Install Font and your computer will do its thing.

Your font will now appear in your FontBook and be available for you to use in Cricut Design Space.

Step 1b: Install the Font on Your PC

For a PC, click on the zip folder. It will open a window that will show you what files are inside the zip, but you'll still need to unzip them.

Select all the fonts and click Extract All at the top. You'll select a destination folder—I chose the desktop.

Then select your unzipped fonts and right click and select install. Your PC will install your fonts.

The font will now be available for you to access in Cricut Design Space!

Step 2: Access the Font in Cricut Design Space

Now that you've installed the font or fonts on your hard drive, accessing them in Cricut Design Space is easy! Use the Text tool in the Design Panel on the left to create a box with your text. The Text Edit menu will open along the top of Cricut Design Space and you can use the Font dropdown to select different fonts for your project.

Cricut Design Space dropdown to select Antenna font

Both Cricut fonts and your system fonts are listed here. You can sort by system fonts, if you'd like, to only see the fonts installed on your computer. You can also use the search bar here if you know the name of the particular font you are looking for. This is particularly helpful if you have a gazillion (bajillion million) fonts like me. Let's select Antenna, which we installed above.

So easy, right? This is the process for selecting any system fonts you want to use!

What are Good Fonts for Cricut Design Space?

Okay! We've installed our fonts and accessed them in Cricut Design Space. I do want to talk about one thing you need to be aware of when it comes to using system fonts.Technically, using a system font is no different than using a Cricut font—though there is a risk I want to mention here.

The Cricut cuts mathematically simple files better than it does mathematically complicated files. Cricut fonts are designed to be mathematically simple, so they cut easily. Your system fonts, however, might not be as simple. Let's take two fonts from this bundle as an example. The first is Blushing. The edges of this font might be a little rough for the Cricut. The Cricut has to adjust the blade and mat direction with every little angle. The Cricut is an amazing machine, but it might not cut this as well as you'd like.

Take a look at Bold Brush, on the other hand. Nice smooth edges. Perfect for cutting on the Cricut!

Keep this in mind when choosing one of your system fonts to cut on the Cricut—smooth edges will cut better. The nice thing about this bundle from FontBundles.net is that I found most of the fonts are actually really great on the Cricut.If you ever wonder if a font is going to cut nicely, just do a test cut using whatever material you're planning on using in your final project. This can give you a good idea whether or not the font will cut well!

Make an Easy Onesie with Your System Fonts

Let's walk through the process of creating a simple onesie using your system fonts. Start by creating a heart using the Shapes tool in the Design Panel, and resizing it to be a bit larger while we work on it.

Change the color, if you'd like, using the Layer Attributes menu in the Layers Panel on the right.

Create a text box and write the word Love. Then select that great Bold Brush font from this bundle.

Cricut Design Space always starts with increased letter spacing, so decrease your letter spacing in the Text Menu to -.05.

Fix Letterspacing in Cricut Design Space

Then resize, rotate, and move over your heart.

Place word over heart in Cricut Design Space

Select both the heart and the word and click Slice in the lower right, at the bottom of the Layers Panel. Learn more about the Slice tool in Cricut Design Space.

Your result will have quite a few extra shapes. Move them away from your final heart with the cutout and delete!

Slice result on mat in Cricut Design Space

There we go! Now we have an easy file to cut using our Cricut. I made this sweet onesie for my friend's new daughter!

I cut the file out of black vinyl and used my EasyPress to adhere it to my onesie (you can also use a traditional iron or heatpress).

SVG from Cricut Design Space for baby shirt

Finished baby onesie using SVG with Cricut

So cute, right? I love being able to make 100% customized gifts for my friends!

I hope this post has helped show you just how amazing it is that you can use your own fonts within Cricut Design Space. It allows us to create amazing designs, above and beyond what Cricut Design Space offers on its own. Make sure to pop over to FontBundles.net to get this month's amazing bundle, and sign up to get notified when the next one goes live!