Spent 4 hours trying to get Stable Diffusion to generate a simple text logo yesterday

I figured I could just type 'neon sign spelling JOE' and it would work, but it kept outputting gibberish squiggles no matter what prompt I used. Has anyone figured out a reliable workflow for getting AI image generators to produce readable text?

3 comments

3 Comments

laura_schmidt821mo ago

Lol honestly I gotta disagree with @the_anthony on this one. AI image generators can totally handle text if you know what you're doing, you just can't treat them like a word processor. The trick is to work backwards - generate your logo concept first without the text, then feed that image back into img2img with a very specific prompt and low denoising strength. I've gotten clean readable text out of that method plenty of times. Or use ControlNet with a canny edge map of your font to force the model to follow the letter shapes exactly. Most people give up way too fast because they expect it to work on the first try.

kimmurphy1mo ago

Oh man, I feel your pain on this one. Did you try any specific negative prompts to filter out the text artifacts? In my experience, the standard Stable Diffusion models are pretty terrible at letters unless you throw in something like "low quality, blurry, distorted text" as a negative, but even then it's hit or miss. I've had the most luck by generating the image without any text at all and then using a separate inpainting pass just for the words - it's clunky but sometimes works. Your mileage may vary obviously, but I've also heard people having better results with fine-tuned models like Realistic Vision or deliberate if you're going for a specific style. Honestly though, for something as simple as a logo with text, you might be better off just using a font generator and sticking it on top in Photoshop - AI image generators just don't seem to understand letters the way we do yet.

the_anthony1mo ago

You know, this reminds me of when I was trying to get an AI to generate a simple birthday card once. After about twenty tries of "Happy Birthday" coming out as "Hapoy Blrthday" or something even worse, I just gave up and wrote it in myself with a marker. Sometimes the old ways are just faster, you know?