How to Make Die-Cut Stickers at Home: Design, Print, and Cut

Die-cut stickers — the ones cut tightly around the artwork, white border and all — look like a print-shop product, but the whole workflow fits on a desk: design the sheet in your browser, print it on an inkjet, and cut it with a machine or a good pair of scissors. This guide walks through all of it, including which cut file each cutting machine actually accepts.

Die-cut vs kiss-cut: which are you making?

Two words that decide your settings later, so let's pin them down first:

• Die-cut — the cut goes through the sticker and its backing paper, so each sticker becomes its own free-standing piece, shaped like the artwork.
• Kiss-cut — the blade cuts the sticker layer only and "kisses" the backing, leaving whole sheets with peelable stickers on them. This is what sticker sheets at a stationery shop are.

Home cutting machines do both — it's just a blade-depth setting. Everything below applies to either; if you're cutting with scissors, you're making die-cut stickers by definition.

What you need

• A printer. Any inkjet works; laser printers need laser-rated sticker paper.
• Sticker paper. Matte is forgiving and writable; glossy makes colours pop but shows fingerprints. For water-resistant stickers (laptops, bottles), use printable vinyl and add a laminate sheet over the print before cutting.
• Something to cut with. A cutting machine (Cricut, Silhouette Cameo, Brother ScanNCut, or any generic vinyl cutter) gives perfect edges — but scissors genuinely work for simple shapes, because the design tool prints a white margin around every sticker that hides small wobbles.

Design the sheet — free, in your browser

The sticker sheet template lays the grid out for you: 50×50 mm stickers fit 12 to an A4 sheet, and the 75×75 mm template fits 4 — spaced so a cutting machine can still read the sheet. Both come in A4, US Letter, A3 and A3+ sizes.

1. Pick a sticker template. In the studio, open the template menu and choose the Stickers group — 50 mm or 75 mm, on your paper size.
2. Upload your artwork. PNG with a transparent background is ideal, but any photo or drawing works — the built-in Remove BG button strips a background in one click.
3. Add anything else. Text, shapes, even a QR code — whatever is in the sticker is treated as one design.
4. Click Sticker Outline (die-cut). The tool traces a smooth cutting line around everything in the sticker automatically, with a small white margin — the contour a cutting machine will follow, and the border you'll cut along by hand. Re-run it any time you change the design.
5. Arrange the sheet. Stickers on a sticker template move freely — drag them anywhere on the sheet to mix sizes and pack the layout tight.

How many stickers per sheet?

Sticker size	A4	US Letter	A3	A3+
50 × 50 mm (2 in)	12	10	30	35
75 × 75 mm (3 in)	4	4	12	20

Those counts leave the sheet's four corners empty on purpose — that is where registration marks go, and every print-then-cut machine needs clear paper around them to find the sheet. It is the one thing that surprises people coming from ordinary printing: a sheet packed edge to edge cannot be machine-cut at all. If you are cutting by hand and don't need marks, raise the rows or columns in the layout panel and pack in more.

Cutting option 1: scissors

Print the sheet as a PDF at 100% scale (no "fit to page"), let the ink dry a few minutes, and cut around each sticker's printed white border. The margin the outline tool adds is your guide — small deviations disappear into it. This route costs nothing and is how most people make their first batch.

Cutting option 2: a cutting machine

Machines never cut along a printed line — they need the cut contour as a digital file, and they find the printed sheet's position using registration marks. The studio exports that file in two formats, next to the paper settings: Cut File (SVG) and Cut File (DXF). Which one you need depends on the machine:

Machine	File to use	Workflow
Cricut	SVG	Import into Design Space, use Print Then Cut — Design Space prints the sheet with its own sensor marks, then the machine cuts.
Silhouette Cameo / Portrait	DXF	The free Silhouette Studio can't open SVG (that needs the paid Designer Edition) — DXF opens in every edition. Add registration marks in Studio, print from there, cut.
Brother ScanNCut	SVG	Import into CanvasWorkspace, or load the SVG from USB directly on SDX models.
Generic / no-name vinyl cutters	SVG (or DXF for older software)	Import into your cutter's software (Sure Cuts A Lot, SignMaster, …). If your machine reads printed corner marks, turn on Show Cutting Mark → Mark style in the studio and match the L-mark measurements from your machine's manual before printing.

Two details that save a wasted sheet: print at 100% / actual size so the printed sheet matches the file's millimetres, and check the size once after importing — some software second-guesses file units. The DXF even includes the sheet outline as a built-in ruler: if it measures exactly your paper size after import, everything else is in the right place.

Tips for a clean batch

• Do a test cut on a plain corner of the sheet before committing — blade depth is the difference between kiss-cut and scrap.
• Let ink dry before laminating or cutting. Inkjet ink smears for the first few minutes, especially on glossy stock.
• Re-trace after big edits. The cutting outline is a snapshot — if you swap the image or move text, click Sticker Outline again so the contour matches.
• Keep artwork out of the corners when using printed registration marks: machines need clear paper around each mark to find it.

From here it's the same loop as our badge and magnet templates: design once, print a sheet whenever you need more. If you're making stickers to sell, the paid plans add watermark-free downloads and higher limits.