Have you ever been working on a design that just felt a little — well, flat? Sometimes we get in a design rut and need a new creative exercise. That’s what brings us to A Color Story! Recently, we’ve updated both A Design Kit and A Color Story to include buttons to jump between apps mid-edit.

Here, we’re giving 5 ideas for how to level up what you’ve created in A Design Kit by adding the finishing touches in A Color Story.

Many filters in A Color Story alter the colors and saturation of your design, but some add a little something special, like the one above! The filter, Icing, from the Cake +pack gives this design a lilac hue and a little sparkle. So fun!

This idea is a little about surrendering to the creative process! If you’ve never played with the Curves tool before, using it on a design is a really fun way to see how it works. Keeping the shadows on this design as dark as possible added a cool outline to the text, and as you can see, the text shifted from red to blue.

This is one of our favorite ways to use A Design Kit and A Color Story together! Here, we created the design, and then brought it into A Color Story to add Geode and Wave Length from the Prism filter +pack. It takes the message in the design to a whole new level!

The Chromatic tool in A Color Story splits the red, green, and blue tones found in your image — and it is more dramatic around the edges of the frame. You can see above how the words blur in the “after”, which completely alters the feel of your design! The color split will be more intense and noticeable with primary colors, or more subtle with pastels, as shown above.

One of the simplest, yet most effective ways, to add a little “oomph” to your design is by applying grain. This can be done using the grain tool in A Color Story, or by adding an effect that has grain. For this one, we applied the Rigby effect from the Dust +pack to get the look!

We hope this has been helpful to get your wheels spinnin’ for new ways to use A Design Kit and A Color Story together. We’d love to hear of any ideas you have, as well! Feel free to reach out to us any time, and share your edits using #acolorstory and #adesign kit. xo!