I have a Brother innovis 1250D, so a lot of what I say here may have already been said, but most of the Brothers have the same basics. First when downloading, make yourself a folder to send the design to on your computer so that you can find it later. When downloading the format will be PES and a lot of time the files will be zipped, so you may need a program to unzip them. I use Winzip which can be downloaded for a free trial and then later paid for as a one time pyt. As someone said, put your downloads on the computer, and you may want to put them in a backup disc like cd in case later your computer crashes or you get a new one. (Ihave been there and done THAT!) Download only those designs you will be using at the moment onto the stick, so for that reason just a 1 or 2 gig stick is more than enough. The reason for this is that the stick will hold too much for the machines computer to read and you will just have to move or delete the designs to get to where it will. Also the screens on a lot of the Brothers have small black and white only screens, and the designs are hard to read on screen. With downloaded embroidery, sometimes the formats will cause Brother to specify the color wrong and Brother will tell you some weird color. There is another free program out there that will allow you to resize your designs and see the colors in them, it is called my editor(wilcom trusizer), and it is a very powerful program. If you are paying for a design make sure that it will fit on your hoop sizes availabale becuase some sites offer designs in numerous sizes that you cannot use. Brother machines (at least mine will only allow you to up or down size the loaded design about 10 percent) so keep this in mind. There are numerous sites that offer free designs, just google free embroidery. Two of the best I have found are embroidery library (emlibrary.com), and embroiderydesigns.com. there is also a magazine designs in machine embroidery that caters to emrboidery that offers some free designs each month and of course sells a lot of stuff. Hope this helps and please feel free to pm me if you have a specific question I can help with. When I started, I had a lot of hair tearing days till I got it right but I do love it and often combine embroidery designs in my quilts.:)