Setting up blade depth and pressure or force is critical to getting good cuts.

60° blades are sharper and are widely used. 45° blades strike a good balance between wear and sharpness. The larger the blade angle, the sharper the blade, but the quicker the blade will dull. Blades usually come in angles from 20° to 60° or so. Most of the issues associated with vinyl cutting are related to vector art quality. In the end, a simple black, yellow and blue image ended up being 25 different colors and had edges on 25 different layers. It turns out that Flexi interpreted the yellow as 8 shades of yellow and created edges between the different shades of yellow and separated these edges onto different layers. Your vinyl cutter can cut lines, arcs and circles but cannot cut a pixel so all artwork must be converted to vector art so your vinyl cutter can cut it properly. Vector art format differs from bitmap or JPEG art format in that vector art contains lines and arcs to define the picture whereas bitmaps and their equivalents are just a pattern of pixels without any edge definition.

If you take a photograph and bring it into a cutting program like Flexi Starter 10 and automatically convert it into vector art you will likely have a mess to clean up.

Creating clean VCRVA is even more time consuming because adequate thought has to go into figuring out what portions of your design you are going to keep and what portions you are going to remove or 'weed' away.

Usually, when people want to vinyl cut an image, creating clean vector art is the most time consuming process but yet it is the most important.

Alternatively, you can draw shapes and prepare vector art specifically for vinyl cutting with a graphics program like InkScape, Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator.

All text on all the Windows or Mac included fonts can be typed directly into a vinyl cutting program. All keyboard fonts are considered vinyl cutter ready vector art (VCRVA or VCVA).

Simple artwork like text is the easiest artwork to cut with a vinyl cutter.

Vinyl cutter paper