I do like Premium. While I haven’t done the metrics for speed or thought through the features like saving projects and access to designs, I have had my eye on Cuttle and since there are so many cool features, I wonder if it would be better to do Cuttle rather than have access to a text feature in the GFUI and the other handy features like grouping, aligning.
I do most of my designing in Inkscape. But I wanted to do a cake topper and my skills are a bit rusty so the Cuttle widget for cake toppers seems so attractive.
There is actually a free level of Cuttle, which you can maybe try while you are making up your mind. You get some minimum level of designs that you can create, besides all of the projects other folks create for public access. You don’t need to pay for Cuttle to do that cake topper.
I have Premium, but have only used it for an offset once. I do most of my work in Silhouette Cameo Business software, and haven’t needed Premium features. I do like having my settings saved when I need to revisit something.
Although, I usually put new settings on my Excel sheet where I record all Glowforge projects. So, if something happens, I could rebuild my custom settings.
I do like the free files, although, there are many that I would never be interested in. I tend to make mostly my own projects.
I think Cuttle is awesome.
I think if I had to choose just one, it would be a tough call.
I’ve never really needed the premium features of Cuddle. But if I did. I’d have a hard choice choosing between it and the premium gfui I’ve gotten very used to just doing things in the premium and not even thinking about the fact that it is part of the premium.
I use Premium, but mostly for the free designs as I’m not good at designing. While there are many that I won’t use, it’s nice that they’re there just in case. I use the free Cuttle, because usually I’m only making a one-of type thing, and you’re allowed to have 5 projects open at a time with the free. Because I’m not mathematically minded, I do have some problems understanding “parameters” and how they work together, but it’s nice that if I’m doing say, a box, it’s easier to change dimensions and have the tabs change as needed without a lot of work, although the last one I did didn’t turn out right, and although I sent a message to Toby to ask why, I never heard back. I do find that I do most of my work in Silhouette Business, whether it’s because I can use any font I have on my computer, or to change a design (excluding Premium designs, of course). I’ve also got Inkscape, but haven’t really delved into it very much. It’s on my to-do list.
Where Cuttle really shines for me, compared to Inkscape or Illustrator, is the non-destructive nature of various modifications.
In Illustrator, I find myself constantly making copies of layers, to keep around an old version, in case I screw something up and want to repeat the same modifications starting from the same original.
In Cuttle, the original is always there – modifications just layer on top of it.
So I can go back in and adjust the original shape, leaving in place any modifications I had put in place.
I love this about it.
It does take getting used to working a little differently, but I find it tremendously powerful.
Then the second piece of Cuttle is the parameterizability. If I ever expect to use a design on different width material, I always use Cuttle, because I can setup parameters for material width and kerf and just enter in new values and have the design ready to go.
This of course also requires some more effort to create the initial design, but well worth it if I expect to cut something again.
One of the big positive external effects of having the GF sub is indefinite unlimited job storage. I know that many of us are grandfathered in to unlimited storage (subscription or not), but I think newer users still have the 30-day limit.
That would be a total deal breaker for me, unlimited storage is where I want to be. In the rare cases I have gone back to old jobs to recut it’s been handy, but the far more useful thing is to go back to old jobs and look at settings that I was moving too quickly to otherwise write down at the time. Cuttle has no analog to this functionality, as far as I know.
Hi Ellen, sorry about this. I did receive your email last month and replied but it must’ve gotten eaten by spam filters. I should’ve followed up. I’m reaching out over DM on this forum.
It looked like you had remixed one of my very early box experiments which I hadn’t constructed properly. The boxes on Cuttle’s Templates page are extensively tested and should work.