Ideogram
The best at text inside images: logos and posters.
Olya's profile
- What sets it apart
- Ideogram was built around a problem other generators handled badly: writing text inside an image without typos. Version 4.0 (June 2026, 9.3 billion parameters, weights published on Hugging Face) added JSON prompting, which lets you place individual elements with bounding boxes on a 0–1000 grid and pin up to 16 exact hex colours. It is less an engine for artistic images and more a graphic design workbench.
- Strengths
- Text comes out readable and where you asked for it, so logos, posters, covers and signage arrive already laid out instead of needing manual repair. Canvas with Magic Fill and Extend regenerates only the masked area — swapping a label, widening the frame — without redoing the whole picture, while style and character references hold a visual identity together across images. Native resolution reaches 2048 pixels per side, with aspect ratios up to 6:1 that suit banners and off-standard formats.
- When to use it
- It pays off when the words are part of the design: packaging mockups, event posters, thumbnails, promotional material, logo drafts to show a client. JSON prompting also suits repetitive production work — same grid, same palette, different content. Magic Fill remains the fastest route to a targeted fix on an image that is already good.
- When to avoid it
- For pure photorealism, crowded scenes or faces there are more convincing models, and the documentation itself suggests natural language over JSON when precision is not needed. The free plan is barely a taste, with a slow queue and non-private generations, and subscription credits burn quickly in quality mode; prices change often, so check the official page. Mind the licence too: the downloadable quantised variants are non-commercial, so paid work goes through the service or the API.