As a writer, I always need images for my articles and blog posts. In the past, I would use stock photos, but AI has changed the game. Now, I can create custom graphics, edit and customize stock photos, or create my own photorealistic images with AI.
Here are the five tools I keep going back to, plus the honest reason each one stays on the list. Fair warning before we start. Not one of these made me a designer. They just let me describe what I want in normal words and hand me something usable, which is the only kind of design work my brain will tolerate.
Canva
I open this one first, every single time. Canva stopped being a template library a while ago and turned into the thing I use for maybe eighty percent of what I need. I type a rough description into Magic Design and it hands me a full layout I can push around until it stops looking generic. The background remover has saved me on more headshots and product shots than I can count. When I need the same graphic sized for a post header and a social card, one click reshapes it.
The AI images it spits out are fine. Good enough for a lot of jobs, though not the ones where the visual has to carry the whole piece. And if you lean on it hard, the monthly credits run dry faster than you'd expect, usually right when you're on deadline. Pro runs somewhere around fifteen dollars a month depending on which price you catch them on, and the free tier is genuinely enough to see whether it fits how you work. For a writer who just needs to stop shipping ugly posts, this is the whole game most days.
Nano Banana
This is what I use for cover images now. It's Google's image generation baked into Gemini, and the naming is a mess because there are a few versions floating around with slightly different price tags. Ignore that part. What matters is that it reads a long, fussy, paragraph-length description the way a person would, and gives back something that actually matches what I pictured. I can write out the mood, the lighting, and the framing I want for a 16:9 header, and it holds most of that together.
You can try it free with daily limits right inside the Gemini app, which is how I started. For blog covers where I want something photoreal and specific, this has quietly become my default.
Ideogram
Every other tool on this list falls apart the second you ask for readable words inside the image. Ideogram is the one that solved that. If I need a quote card or a thumbnail with an actual headline sitting on it, this is where I go. The text comes out clean instead of the usual alphabet soup.
The free tier gives you around ten prompts a day, and paid plans start near seven dollars, so it's a cheap thing to keep in your back pocket for the handful of posts where the words have to live in the picture.
Midjourney
I'll be honest about my history with this Midjourney. I bailed on it early because everything ran through Discord and I could not make myself care enough to learn the etiquette. Then they shipped a real web app, and I came back. When a post genuinely deserves a striking image, Midjourney still makes the best-looking output I can get out of a text prompt. It's the one I reach for when the visual is the whole point.
The catch is money and mechanics. There's no free tier anymore, plans start at ten dollars, and you're really buying GPU time rather than a set number of images, which took me a minute to wrap my head around. For someone publishing a few posts a week, the lowest plan burns through fast. I don't run it as my daily driver. I save it for the pieces that earn it.
Recraft
This is the odd one out, and I'll admit it's more tool than I strictly need. Recraft makes vector graphics, the kind that stay sharp at any size, and it's weirdly good at holding a consistent style across a whole batch. I started using it when I wanted a matching set of simple headers for a series so my posts didn't look like five strangers made them. If visual consistency across a run of articles matters to you, it's worth a look. If it doesn't, skip it without guilt.
What actually ties these together
Not one of these is a design education. That's the point. The ones that stuck are the ones that let me stay a writer, describe an image in a sentence or two, and get back something I'm not embarrassed to publish. The flashier a tool wants me to get, the less I use it.
What are you all using to make your covers? I'm always hunting for the one that finally makes this painless.
