Grown in Ideogram · a case study

How Pea got its face.

At half past midnight on 5 October, a pea got a face. By breakfast it had a wardrobe. Three weeks later it had seven hundred pictures, and the face in every one of them is the face from that night.

Stu Jordan, Chief Pea Grower October 2026 Made in Ideogram 4.5

An early Pea with dark eyebrows — Eyebrows · 3 October

An early Pea with one front tooth — One tooth · 4 October

An early Pea with a full row of teeth — Teeth · 4 October

The locked Pea: velvet bumps, a wide open grin with a pink tongue, no teeth — The face · 5 October, 00:31

Three faces we didn't ship, and the one we did.

01The brief

A face for everywhere at once.

Pea is a personal executive assistant you own, and it was about to meet a lot of people in a lot of places. A website. A one-minute film. The page it opens for you every morning. A feed, a Zoom studio, the back of a shirt. One character across all of it, made by one founder with no illustrator and an agent at the keyboard.

The brief fitted on a line. Cute, but never babyish. It's an executive assistant, after all.

023 to 4 October

The back came first.

Ideogram got the back right before the face. A velvet pea, one curly sprout, two mitten hands and a little bum.

I put it on my X profile that night and on the first teaser poster before the front existed. People met Pea from behind and liked it. The character was already in there. We just hadn't found the front.

Pea from behind, in soft pink and cream light, with the sprout and the little bum crease — The first thing anyone saw of Pea.

034 to 5 October

A face that works once isn't a face.

Eyebrows gave it attitude in one picture and a frown in the next. A single tooth was adorable on one sheet and unsettling on the one after, and a full set of teeth was a lot of mouth for every day.

Ideogram made the wrong ones cheap, which is the only reason we found the right one. Sixty-four pictures, then a better question. Forget a good picture. Find a face that survives a sheet of them.

Three rounds later, at 00:31 on the fifth, number four of four.

“This one nailed it.”
Stu, 5 October, 00:31

Round 13, picture one — The last sheet. Four from one prompt, and the other three were “a little bit big”.

Round 13, picture two — The last sheet. Four from one prompt, and the other three were “a little bit big”.

045 October

Eight things that never move.

A locked face is a short list. We pinned eight things to one picture, and that picture has gone into every prompt since. Everything else, the job, the prop, the room, the light, was free.

That's the whole trick. Ideogram holds the picture. The list holds the lines.

Pea, the locked master picture: a round velvet green pea waving, with a curly sprout and a wide open grin

1
One sprout. Curl to the right, leaf low on the other side. Never a twin.
2
Velvet bumps. No eyebrows, ever.
3
Googly eyes. A catchlight in each.
4
Raised cheeks, plain green. No blush.
5
The grin. Set low, tongue out. No teeth.
6
A sideways belly button. An innie, with a crescent.
7
Matte velvet. One piece, no seams.
8
Short and stubby. Mitten hands, round feet, a bum crease at the back.

055 to 21 October

Then the flood.

With the face locked, a new picture was one paragraph: the gag, played in full. Pea became a bouncer, a goalkeeper, a fortune teller, a lifeguard above a pool of paperwork.

Seven hundred pictures in three weeks. Not one of them is a stranger.

Pea as a nightclub bouncer with a clipboard — On the list?

Pea diving to catch a sticky note — Not on Pea's watch.

Pea guarding a door with a do not disturb sign — Do not disturb.

Pea winking over a chessboard — Your move.

Pea in a shop window with a coming soon tag — Coming soon.

Pea in a pea-green racing car — Pit stop.

Pea as a lifeguard above a pool of paperwork — Lifeguard on duty.

Pea conducting an orchestra of office things — Maestro.

Pea in a fire helmet putting out little fires on a desk — Little fires.

Pea holding a big golden key with a pod handle — Your key.

Pea in a guard's cap in front of a bank vault — Our secret.

Pea in a space helmet beside a pea-pod rocket — Launching soon.

Pea surfing a wave of paperwork on a pod board — Surf's up.

Pea in glasses reading a long scroll — Checked it twice.

Pea gasping at a laptop — The face Pea made.

0610 October

The sprout that became a p.

Five days in I noticed something. Turn Pea round and its sprout is the p from the logo, with a bit more curl. So the curl changed direction and the leaf dropped low, and the character and the logo started rhyming.

Eight pictures came back. We'd changed one thing, and only that thing had changed. That was the night I started treating Ideogram as a design partner that keeps its word.

“The leaf needs to be much lower.”
Stu, 10 October, on number four

Sprout candidate one, an open spiral with the leaf low on the left

Sprout candidate four, with the leaf high on the stem

Sprout candidate eight, a tight loop near the stem

Never obviously a p. Just able to be one.

0720 October

The last rule.

Ideogram likes rosy cheeks on a cute character. For two weeks I let it, and then I didn't. One sentence in the prompt, a reference with plain cheeks, and forty pictures came back clean.

A brand rule, enforced by a sentence.

Pea's face with a warm glow on each cheek — Before

Pea's face with plain green cheeks — Before

08October

Everywhere, at once.

The same Pea is now on the website, in the film, in the feed every second day, behind me on every Zoom call and on the back of a shirt. One folder of cut-outs runs the lot.

A frame from the meetpea.com film: Pea waving and saying hi

A frame from a short Pea clip: Pea diving for a sticky note

A television studio set with a lit pea sign and a Pea statue

The four-hundredth drawing.

The hard part of a character was never the first drawing. It was the four-hundredth. For most of my working life that took a studio, and a style guide thick enough to police it.

Now it takes one locked picture and a short list of things that never move. The four-hundredth drawing is the easy one.

Use @img_1 as the exact character: the things about it that never move, in plain words. Keep it exactly on-model. IMPORTANT: what it must never have, for example no blush at all, no teeth.

One line of style. Premium 3D animated film still, soft studio light, clean and uncluttered.

The gag, played in full, with the props in your character's world.

@img_1 is the one picture you locked

Ideogram 4.5Magic Prompt offQuality HighFour at a time, twiceOne referenceOne prompt at a time

Pea's, filled in

Use @img_1 as the exact character: the same cute pea character with soft green velvet flocked fur, a round egg-shaped body, big round glossy eyes, two soft raised velvet bumps where eyebrows would be (no eyebrows), a wide open grin set low with a pink tongue and no teeth, a small sideways oval dimple belly button, short stubby velvet arms and legs, and one curly sprout on top whose curl turns to the viewer's right with one small leaf low on the opposite side of the stem. Keep it exactly on-model. IMPORTANT: no blush at all. No rosy, pink, peach or orange cheeks; the cheeks are exactly the same even velvet green as the rest of the body.

Premium 3D animated feature film still, soft warm studio lighting, shallow depth of field, clean and uncluttered, no mess, cute and funny.

The pea dives horizontally through the air like a football goalkeeper making a spectacular save, arms fully stretched, catching a small yellow sticky note an instant before it slips into a narrow gap between wooden floorboards beside a desk leg. Determined, delighted face, a little motion blur, camera at floor level.

Square 2000 × 2000 · 16:9 2720 × 1536 · 4:5 1792 × 2240 · 9:16 1440 × 2560, sides in multiples of 32 · for a tall card, add: keep Pea between 30% and 80% of the height, the top 30% plain background

Who's driving

An agent, Claude in a Chrome tab signed in to my Ideogram account, types the prompt, queues the runs, reads the grid and fetches the full-size files. I look at the sheets and pick. Roughly one pick in four goes back for a rule: teeth on a closed-eye grin, a belly button sliding into a hole, a curl that flipped. Cut-outs are a small script that keys the plain backdrop and keeps the shadow, or Ideogram's Remove Background for a credit.