I’d like to make a custom cake topper for my daughter’s upcoming birthday, but being a design newbie, it’s been a lot harder than I thought.
Is there anyone here who can provide me instructions on Affinity Designer on how I’m suppose to create the svg file that can be cut by the GF. A video tutorial session would be amazing.
I just want it to say Happy Birthday Princess. Thanks in advance.
Affinity Designer’s strength is text on a path. Here is a YouTube video that shows how to do it. You should be able be make something really spectacular!
Once you have your artwork done (and the Affinity tutorials are going to be more help to you than I am, because I’m still learning it!), go to File -> Export and select SVG. In the window that opens, set “Raster DPI” to 96, then click the “More” button, make sure the radio button is selected next to “Use DPI,” and select 96 in that pulldown as well.
That should export it at the proper scale for preserving your measurements when you pull it into the GFUI, but if you want to be extra sure, put a 1" or 1 cm square in your design file that you can use to verify the scale after export.
The Tips & Tricks “Matrix” has a really good resource for properly setting up 2D vector programs (including a section on AD):
Scroll down a bit and your see the section relevant to AD.
Hope this helps!
I tried to create a cake topper when you first posted , (with Affinity Designer, which I just got a couple nights ago to run a test on, and haven’t really gotten conversant with it yet), and i wasn’t able to do it.
Now that could be because, like I said, I’m still unfamiliar with how it works, or it could be because I can’t find a couple of very important functions necessary to design cake toppers. I know it doesn’t have an Auto Trace, and if you want the shape of the topper to follow the flow of the letters, you are going to have a really tough time trying to do it in AD.
So I tried to work around that by merging some path offsets…and that’s where I hit the other wall. The offset path function on AD appears to be tied to the raster side of things, not the vector side, and while I can get a nice glowy looking thing around the text, I can’t turn it into a vector path for cutting.
Third problem…merging overlapping paths cuts a segment out instead of merging them, and unfortunately, I don’t know how to adjust for that yet. So no script fonts.
I’d consider trying out Inkscape for creating your topper, I’m just not sure there’s a way to do it in AD.
But, because I also know that some people swear by it…here’s a link to an AD video for beginners. Maybe you can find something in there that will help you.
YouTube probably has a few others that can tell you how to use the program, or you can check the AD site for tutorials.
Maybe there are tutorials on doing it in Inkscape? Since it’s free, it could be worth trying that route.
Alternatively, if you know someone with a Silhouette, the Silhouette software (Business edition) does this beautifully. Type out your letters, add a “stick,” and hit “Weld.” I didn’t fully appreciate this software until I started trying to do similar things in Inkscape and it’s so much harder. I am determined to build up my vector design skills, but when I’m in a hurry…
Reletively simple in Inkscape
Under extensions there is several ways to do pattern along path, Pattern along Path is redundantly one of them. You make sure the circle is at the bottom of the stack and that the text is hit with make path (at which it is a complex group but no matter just use the group) then just select both and
