In 2024, AI image generation solved its biggest problems: Text, Hands, and Composition. It was the year prompt engineering became less about hacking the model and more about art direction. ## 🎨 The King of Aesthetics: Midjourney v6 Early in the year, **Midjourney v6** set a bar so high it seemed untouchable. Its ability to understand natural language nuances and lighting text prompts made it the default choice for designers. * *The Vibe:* Cinematic, heavily stylized, and opinionated. ## 🔓 The Open Weight Revolution: FLUX.1 In August 2024, Black Forest Labs (ex-Stability engineers) dropped the bomb: **FLUX.1**. It wasn't just good; it was arguably *better* than Midjourney, and it was open. * **Why it mattered:** For the first time, you could run SOTA image generation on your own GPU. It followed prompts with robotic precision. ## ✍️ The Text Wizard: Ideogram While others focused on lighting, **Ideogram** focused on typography. In 2024, if you needed a T-shirt design or a logo with legible text, you used Ideogram. ## 📉 The Stumble: Stable Diffusion 3 Stability AI had a rough year. SD3 Medium released with a license that confused the community and a model that struggled with human anatomy (the infamous laying on grass glitches). It paved the way for FLUX to take the open-source crown. ## 🏆 2024 Winners | Category | Winner | Why? | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | **Best Overall** | **FLUX.1 [dev]** | The perfect balance of quality, prompt adherence, and open access. | | **Best Aesthetics** | **Midjourney v6** | Still the most beautiful model by default. | | **Best Typography** | **Ideogram** | The only model that could spell Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious correctly. | | **Best Speed** | **SDXL Turbo** | Real-time generation became a reality. | ## MangoMind's Take We saw a massive shift in user behavior in 2024. Users moved from playing with AI art to building businesses on it. The arrival of **FLUX.1** (which is free on MangoMind Student plans) democratized high-end generation for everyone in Bangladesh, making us the top **AI creative studio platform** in the region. The days of AI hands are over. 2025 is about control.