Ideogram Style References and Colour Palettes Guide

Ideogram is now API-only. The web app is gone; the prompting advice and settings below still apply when you call Ideogram through its API.

Ideogram gives you two direct levers for brand consistency that most generators lack: Style References, where you upload up to three images and Ideogram borrows their look, and colour palettes, chosen from presets or typed in as your own hex codes. Together with the style presets and a locked seed, they let you produce a set of images that read as one campaign rather than a collection of lucky accidents.

Style References: borrow the look, not the subject

A Style Reference tells Ideogram "make it look like this" without copying what is in the picture. Upload up to three images and the model picks up their colour treatment, texture, rendering style and overall mood, then applies them to whatever your prompt describes.

• Choose references that agree with each other. Three images in the same style reinforce the look. Three different styles produce an average that belongs to none of them.
• Use your own work or work you have the right to use. Previous generations, your brand’s illustration library, your own photography. Avoid uploading another artist’s work as a reference.
• Keep the subject out of the way. If every reference shows a dog, you will get dogs. Choose references where the style is strong and the subject is incidental, or crop to a texture-heavy area.
• Describe the subject fully in the prompt. The reference handles finish; the prompt has to carry everything else.

Style References are most powerful for series work: generate one hero image you love, then use it as the reference for every subsequent image in the set.

Colour palettes: presets and your own hexes

Ideogram’s palette control constrains the colours the model uses. You can pick a named preset or enter your own hex values, which is where brand work gets precise. Give it the three to five colours in your guidelines and the output stays close to them.

Some practical notes:

• Include a light and a dark. A palette of five mid-tones gives the model nowhere to put highlights and shadows, so it ignores you. Add your paper colour and your darkest ink.
• Lead with the primary. List your main brand colour first and name it in the prompt as well, so its dominance is explicit rather than left to chance.
• Palettes steer rather than clamp. Expect close matches, not pixel-exact values. Final colour correction still happens in your design tool.
• Combine with words. "deep teal and warm orange on cream" in the prompt plus the matching hexes in the palette is more reliable than either alone.

Combining references, palettes and presets

The three controls overlap, so decide which one is in charge. A sensible hierarchy for brand work is: palette fixes the colours, Style Reference fixes the finish, style preset (Design, Realistic, General or Auto) fixes the broad category. If two disagree, the result is muddy. A Realistic preset with a flat-vector Style Reference, for example, produces a half-photographic illustration nobody asked for.

Magic Prompt sits on top of all of this. Set it to Off when you are using references and palettes: an expanded prompt can introduce colours and style words that contradict your constraints. Lock the seed once a composition is right and vary only the prompt. Rendering speed is a separate choice; test on Default and run the keepers on Quality. For typography on top of the same brand system, see Ideogram text and typography.

A repeatable brand workflow

1. Build the palette once. Enter your brand hexes, including a light and a dark, and save the palette if the interface allows it; otherwise keep the hexes in a note.
2. Make a hero image. Use the palette, a Design or Realistic preset, Magic Prompt on Auto for one exploratory batch, then Off to refine. Pick the single image that best represents the look.
3. Promote it to Style Reference. Upload the hero (and up to two close siblings) as references for everything that follows.
4. Write a fixed style sentence. Something like "flat vector illustration, grainy texture, soft shadows, generous white space" that goes at the end of every prompt unchanged.
5. Generate in batches with a locked seed. Change only the subject line of each prompt. Review as a grid: inconsistencies are obvious side by side and invisible one at a time.
6. Record the recipe. Hexes, reference images, preset, seed and the style sentence. The next person on the account, or you in a year, will need it.

Settings at a glance

Try it

With one Style Reference loaded, your palette set and Magic Prompt off:

A flat vector illustration of a cyclist crossing a quiet bridge at sunrise, grainy texture, soft shadows, generous white space, calm and optimistic, no text

Keep everything after "sunrise" fixed as your style sentence and swap only the scene ("a baker opening her shop", "two friends on a train platform"). If the colours drift, name the dominant brand colour in the prompt before changing anything else.