AI Images With Readable Text: Why Most Engines Fail
Asking an AI image generator for a sign, a label or a poster usually returns nonsense letters. Why that happens, which engine is built for text, and how to prompt for it.
By the WorkCrafter team · how we write these guides
Ask almost any AI image generator for "a shop sign reading FRESH BREAD" and you get a beautiful photograph of a sign that says FRFSH BRAED, or something that looks like letters from a distance and dissolves up close. It is the single most common disappointment in AI image generation, and it is not a bug you can prompt your way around on an engine that cannot do it.
Why text is the hard part
An image model does not write. It produces pixels that look statistically like the images it learned from, and in those images letters are just shapes that tend to appear in certain arrangements. The model has no concept of spelling, so it reproduces the texture of writing — the right stroke weights, the right spacing, the right perspective on a curved sign — without the content. That is why the failure looks so specific: the typography is often excellent and the word is wrong.
This gets worse the more letters you ask for. A single large word has a reasonable chance; a paragraph of body copy on a poster has essentially none. It also gets worse at small sizes, where there are too few pixels for a letter to be unambiguous.
Ideogram is the engine built for this
Some models are trained and tuned specifically to render text, and Ideogram is the best known of them. It is in the WorkCrafter image tool as **Ideogram 4.5**, at 10 credits per image. If what you need is a sign, a label, a book cover, a poster headline or a product mock-up with words on it, start there rather than fighting a general-purpose engine.
To be straight with you about what we are claiming: Ideogram is the engine designed for the job, and it is the only one in our menu positioned that way. We are not promising perfect spelling every time — no engine does that, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling. Expect to generate a few and pick, especially for anything longer than a couple of words.
How to prompt for text that comes out right
- **Put the exact words in quotation marks.** "A wooden shop sign reading "FRESH BREAD" above a bakery door" works better than describing the sign and hoping.
- **Keep it short.** One to four words is the realistic zone. If your design needs a paragraph, generate the image without the text and add the type afterwards — see below.
- **Say how big the text is in frame.** "Large letters filling the width of the sign" gives the model pixels to work with. Small text has no chance.
- **Name the style of lettering, not just the words.** "Hand-painted serif", "chunky sans-serif", "chalk lettering" all steer it toward arrangements it knows well.
- **Avoid curved, angled or reflected text** on a first attempt. A flat sign facing the camera is far more likely to spell correctly than the same words wrapped around a mug.
- **Generate several and choose.** At 10 credits, three attempts cost less than most stock photo licences, and picking the best of three is the normal workflow, not a failure.
The reliable alternative: generate the image, add the type
For anything where the wording must be exactly right — a price, a brand name, a legal line, a date — do not ask the model for it at all. Generate the image with deliberate empty space where the text belongs ("a blank wooden sign above a bakery door", "a plain white label on an amber bottle"), then set the type yourself. It will be correctly spelled, correctly kerned, editable, and in your actual brand font, which no image model can give you.
This is almost always the right answer for commercial work. A client will ask for a wording change, and a change to real type takes seconds while a change to generated lettering means generating again and losing everything else about the image you had approved.
Which image engine for which job
There are 18 engines in the image tool now, which is more useful than it sounds once you know what to reach for.
- **Words in the image** — Ideogram 4.5, 10 credits.
- **Just exploring an idea** — the standard engines, from 1 credit. Iterate here first; on a first attempt the prompt is nearly always the problem, not the engine.
- **Cheapest premium look** — Muse Image at 2 credits, or Seedream 5 Flash at 3. Both cost about what a standard engine does.
- **Photographic realism** — Seedream 5 Pro or GPT Image 2, 6 credits each. See why AI images look fake and how to fix it.
- **Highest detail, no budget limit** — Nano Banana Pro at 24 credits.
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