I just got my cricut cake yesterday and am very pleased with it so far....but I can't figure out this design studio thing people are talking about.....I only have the basic cake cartridge that came with the machine and people are saying that if I purchase design studio I can use the basic cake cartridge?????? I don't understand!!!! Does anyone out their have design studio for their cricut cake??? Do I need to purchase all individual cartridges for the designs I want or can I just purchase design studio and create my own????? PLEASE HELP......

My understanding is with Design Studio, you can create layouts on the computer, then have the Cricut cut them. It is similar to many other graphics programs, like card creating ones, etc. The only rub is, even though DS allows you to use all the cartridges to design with, you must have the ones used in order to actually cut the shape. You must still invest in cartridges.

With the Cake Basic, you would be able to layout your lettering and other shapes, size them to any size you want, do other design magic like "welding" your letters together to make them into one peice (think bubble writing like in junior high!). You would then send the layout to your machine using a USB cable, then let it start cutting. My understanding is that it will stop and tell you what cartridge to put on the port on the cricut. So if you do a layout using several cartridges, it will stop several times to have you change cartridges.

I have a cricut, but do not use design studio. This information is culled from my reading message boards and informational posts on many blogs.

Design studio is a software program that helps layout the shapes you're about to cut. You do need to have the cartridge that goes with the shape though. We use the cricut cake but use it with make the cut software, cricut has disable the ablility to do so with their later models. I wouldn't buy another cricut because of this.