Ideogram

Overview Ideogram is the AI image model you use when the image has to contain text — legible, kerned, correctly spelled text that a designer would not throw away. Founded in 2022 by a team of ex Google Brain researchers who worked on Imagen (Mohammad Norouzi, Chitwan Saharia, William Chan, and others), Ideogram launched publicly in August 2023 with a single differentiator that no competing model had solved: text rendering that actually works. Almost three years later, in mid 2026, Ideogram is still the reference tool for anything involving typography inside an image, and the rest of the field is still catching up. What sets Ideogram apart is a very narrow but very deep specialization. Every other general purpose model treats text in image as a nice to have. Ideogram treats it as the product. The result is that when you type "movie poster, retro serif title reading DUNE OF DUST across the top, quiet desert palette, sun rising behind a lone figure," Ideogram delivers a poster with the exact string, correctly kerned, correctly spelled, in a plausible font, composed with the rest of the image. Midjourney will give you something beautiful with fake words. DALL E 3 will give you the words but at a lower aesthetic level. Flux will get close but not there. Ideogram is the boring, correct choice for the one job. The current default model, Ideogram 2.0 (with a 2.1 update pushed through 2026), extended the original text rendering strength into general aesthetic quality that…