Ideogram Vector: AI Logos as Editable SVG Files, and the Five Checks to Run Before You Send One to a Printer
Every AI image you have ever generated was a grid of coloured dots. Blow it up for a banner and the edges go soft. Ask the client to change the red to their brand red and you are back in the generator, rolling the dice again, hoping the new version keeps the parts they liked.
On October 22, Ideogram shipped a model that does not make dots. Ideogram Vector returns an SVG: a file made of shapes and curves, described as maths, that stays sharp at any size and opens in Illustrator, Affinity or Inkscape as something you can select and change. Ideogram's own page calls the output "Scalable. Editable." and invites you to "Select and refine individual elements in your vector editor."
That is a bigger promise than it sounds. It is also a promise you cannot judge from the preview thumbnail. A vector file can look perfect on screen and still be a nightmare to work with. So the question this piece answers is simple: what is actually inside the file, and how do you find out in ten minutes?
What Ideogram Vector does
There are two ways in.
Text to vector. You write a prompt for a logo, an icon, a badge or an illustration, and get back an SVG. You can add reference images to steer the style.
Image to vector. You upload a PNG, JPEG or WEBP (up to 50 MB, per Creator's Toolbox's read of the API docs) and get back a vector version. This is the one most working designers will use first, because every studio has a folder of old logos that only exist as low-resolution JPEGs.
The conversion has two modes. Simple draws fewer, simpler shapes. Default keeps more fine detail. That choice matters more than it looks, and we will come back to it.
Prices, from Ideogram's model page, per SVG:
- Text to vector: $0.13 at low quality, $0.16 at medium, $0.20 at high
- High quality with reference images: $0.32
- Image to vector: $0.10
For scale, Recraft's competing text-to-vector model on fal lists $0.08 per image. Ideogram is not the cheapest route to an SVG. Its pitch rests on the typography the company is known for.
On rights, Ideogram's pricing FAQ says it does not claim ownership of what you generate and that you can use it commercially, pointing to its terms for the details. Eligible free accounts get weekly credits, but by default everything you make is published publicly. If you are working on an unannounced brand, that matters. Private generation sits on the paid Plus and Pro plans.
Why the file matters more than the picture
Here is the mechanism in plain terms. A pixel image stores colour at each point of a grid. A vector file stores instructions: start here, curve to there, fill this shape with this colour. Each turn in a curve is an anchor point, a little handle you can grab and move.
A good vector file, the kind a designer would draw by hand, uses as few anchor points as it can get away with. The letter O might be four points. A clean wordmark might be a few hundred points in total. That file is small, it scales, and anyone can adjust it.
An automatic trace does something different. It looks at the picture and tries to reproduce every edge it sees, including the fuzz, the compression blocks and the slightly wobbly line from a scan. Each wobble becomes more points. You can end up with a logo that looks right and carries thousands of points, and the first time someone tries to nudge a curve, it ripples like wet paper.
The docs set no cap on how complex a file can get, and OrcaRouter's review of the docs advises opening the file and counting the points yourself. That is the honest state of things on launch day. So that is what we will do.
Put this into practice: the five-check routine
Pick one real job. The best test is an old logo you have only as a JPEG, because you know exactly what it should look like and you know what a clean version would cost you to redraw.
1. Run both conversion modes on the same image. Upload the logo and convert it once in Simple and once in Default. That is twenty cents. Open both files side by side in your vector editor.
2. Count the points on one curve. Choose the curviest letter or shape. Select it with the direct selection tool and look at the anchor points. A smooth curve with a dozen points is fine. A smooth curve with sixty is a trace that followed the noise. Usually Simple wins here for logos, and Default wins for illustrations with texture you want to keep. Keep the version with the fewest points that still holds the silhouette at the size it will be used.
3. Check the structure. Try to select one element, say the icon without the wordmark. Coverage of the API docs says grouping "is not yet available" for converted images, which means a vectorized file arrives as one flat pile of paths. Text-to-vector files reportedly come with separate, individually selectable shapes, per OrcaRouter. Expect to do your own grouping and layer naming on conversions. Ten minutes of tidying is fine. An hour means the file is costing more than it saved.
4. Find out what happened to the type. This is the check that bites people. Lettering in an SVG can be live text you can retype, outlines that look like letters but are really shapes, or a jumble of fragments. Ideogram says its typography stays editable, but OrcaRouter notes nobody outside Ideogram has published a test of that claim. Click on a word. If you can retype it, great. If it is outlines, any wording change later becomes a redraw, so check the spelling now, letter by letter, while it is cheap to fix.
5. Recolour one element to the brand colour. Ideogram says colours and gradients are editable. Select one shape and change it to the exact brand value. Look for leftover slivers in the old colour along the edges, which is a classic trace artefact, and check whether a gradient is a real gradient or a stack of slightly different flat bands.
If the file passes all five, you have a usable master for ten to twenty cents. If it fails on structure or type, treat it as a very good tracing reference and redraw on top of it. That is still faster than starting from a blurry JPEG.
Prompting for text to vector
When you generate from scratch, write the prompt the way you would brief an illustrator for flat artwork, because that is what turns into clean paths. Name the number of colours. Ask for flat colour or a single simple gradient. Describe the shape language ("thick geometric strokes, rounded corners"). Keep fine texture out unless you want it, since every speck becomes geometry.
One trap from launch coverage: typing "vector" into the prompt of a normal pixel model does not make a vector file. If you are in Ideogram's app, make sure you picked the Vector model. Saving as PNG or JPEG gives you dots again.
A note for people using the API
OrcaRouter reports that the API accepts a dry_run setting that prices a request "without generating, storing or billing it." If you are building a batch job, say vectorizing a client's entire icon library, run the quote first. No batch discount is published. Ideogram Vector also arrived in ComfyUI in version 0.42.5, released October 23, as "Generate SVG" and "Image to SVG" partner nodes, which run on Comfy's paid credits.
Where it breaks
No edit endpoint. You cannot ask the model to change one shape in an existing SVG. Once you have the file, changes happen in your editor or not at all. That is fine if you are a designer. It is a wall if you hoped to iterate by prompt.
Converted files are flat. No grouping on image-to-vector output yet. Plan to sort the layers yourself.
Point counts are unknown until you look. Nothing in the documentation caps file complexity. A detailed SVG can also be heavy, which matters on a website.
The type question is open. Live text, outlines or fragments: you will only know per file.
Public by default on free accounts. Unannounced client work belongs on a paid plan.
It is one day old. There are no independent quality tests yet. The editability claims are Ideogram's, and the deeper details here come from coverage of the API docs rather than from a hands-on study.
There is also the case where a person still wins outright. A hand-drawn vector logo, built by someone who knows where a curve needs a point and where it does not, will be lighter and cleaner than any trace. For a flagship brand mark, use the AI file as a sketch, not a deliverable.
The bigger point
For two years the honest answer to "can AI make me a logo?" was "it can make you a picture of a logo." The file was the thing you could not get. Ideogram Vector is the first big-name model built around giving you the file, and that changes where the work sits. The prompt gets you close. Your vector editor, and your eye for a clean curve, finishes it.
So do not judge it by the thumbnail. Take the ugliest JPEG logo in your archive, spend twenty cents, and open both results. Count the points on one letter. You will know in ten minutes whether this goes into your toolkit or into the tracing-reference drawer.