How To Design Leather Templates

[bylinesupplyco]

I have a bunch of designs of my products that I used poster board templates for.

I really want to get some laser cut templates from Joyce at Black River Laser to ensure tracing accuracy and the life of my templates.

For those of you who have used acrylic templates, how do you go about designing them as far as programs go?

Do you use Photoshop, Illustrator, AutoCAD etc?

I have experience (somewhat) with Illustrator and Photoshop, I just need to be able to determine line length etc.

Any tips would be great!

[Chief31794]

Inkscape is an open source vector graphics program that does a great job. It's not hard to learn and has all the capability I need to layout templates. Joyce can use the Vector Graphics Files (.SVG) straight from the program. I also use it for some more temporary templates, save them as .PDF and then print them as I need them and glue them to poster board and cut them out. But I predominately use BlackRiverLaser.com for anything I'm going to be making several of. She's great to work with.

You can find all you need to know about Inkscape here:

https://inkscape.org/en/

Since it's open source and free to download there is no cost of any type.

Chief

[veedub3]

I use CorelDraw, Joyce can work with several file formats but I do think that it must be a vector file so photoshop won't work because it is Raster. if you have experience with Illustrator and have access to the program then that is what I would use. If not then I would go with the free program Inkscape as Chief suggested.

Karina

[Kanukki]

Another vote for Inkscape. Can do almost everything that Illustrator can, but for free. Building up a collection of patterns now to send to Joyce for templates.