A sticker needs a white margin around the artwork, and a line for the cutting machine to follow. Drawn by hand, the margin is wider in one place and thinner in another, and the cut line has to be traced again whenever the artwork changes. A vector editor can do both from the artwork itself: push the outline out by a fixed distance, merge the result into one shape, and use that shape as the border and the cut line. The steps below use the Vector Editor in the osFoundry desktop app on a cat-head drawing with a heart and a star beside it, saved as a 60 mm SVG artboard.
Offset the outline by 3 mm
Open the SVG in the Vector Editor. The drawing opens as separate editable shapes, nine of them here: the face, two ears, two eyes, the nose, the mouth, the heart and the star. Select everything with Command-A (Ctrl-A elsewhere), then click Offset Path in Quick Actions on the right.
Type 3 mm in the Offset field and set Joins to Round. Each edge moves out by exactly that distance. Round turns every outer corner into an arc with a 3 mm radius, so the border has no sharp points; Miter would extend the star's tips well past the rest of the border. Click OK.
Nothing seems to happen to the cat, because the new shapes are stacked above the original ones, and the selection box grows to 46.5 × 40.9 mm from 40.5 × 34.9 mm.
Unite the copies into one shape
Offset Path made nine new shapes, one per original, and they overlap each other. Each has its own outline, so a cutter following them would also cut through the middle of the sticker. With the copies still selected, click Unite in the Pathfinder section of the Properties panel.
Every overlap melts away and what remains is a single path with a single outer edge. That edge is the shape of the sticker.
The Unite button in the floating bar under the selection also works, but it moves as the selection changes size. The one in the Pathfinder section stays where it is.
Make it white with a cut line
With the united shape selected, press D. That resets the appearance to a white fill and a black 1 pt stroke: the white is the border, the black line is where the blade goes. Then send it behind the artwork with Send to Back, Command-Shift-[ on a Mac.
The cat is back on top, with the same border width in the narrow gap between the star and the face as around the ears.
Save the file for the print shop
Open the File menu, choose Save as PDF and click Save PDF. The sticker is 46.5 × 40.9 mm, and the PDF from this drawing came out at about 8 KB. Most print shops ask for the cut line as its own colour or layer, so check their file guide before sending; the black line here is a plain stroke on the shape.
The same three steps work on any drawing made of closed shapes. A logo with a gap in its lettering gets a border that fills the gap if the offset is large enough: in a separate check of this drawing, 3 mm joins the cat, heart and star into one piece, while 1 mm leaves three separate pieces.
The Vector Editor is part of the apps in osFoundry, and the desktop app is free from the download page for macOS, Windows and Linux.
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