I redid every cover image on our blog in an afternoon with Claude, Ideogram, and Contentful

Our blog cover images were a mishmash. Years of varying styles and quality, no through-line, nothing that read as one brand. It bugged me for months. Filing a design ticket felt like a three-week detour, so one afternoon this week I did it myself.

Eighty-one posts, two years of the blog. New cover on every one. Done before dinner.

Three tools carried it: Claude Code to run the pipeline, the Contentful MCP to hold the posts and take the new covers back, and Ideogram to generate the art. Here is how the afternoon actually went.

Claude Code ran the pipeline

One from the batch: the new cover on Top 10 push notification providers.

I described what I wanted in plain sentences and it built the whole thing. Opus 4.8 orchestrated. Sonnet 5 ran the workers, one per post, in parallel. I wrote no code. Nobody does anymore.

The framework was mine: six angles per post. Four depict the actual content:

• Subject: the thing at the center of the post
• Process: the mechanism it explains
• Contrast: the comparison or decision it draws
• Payoff: what the reader walks away with

The other two are abstract fallbacks, for when the literal ones miss. Each worker did the same job: read its post, summarize it, write one concept per angle, render all six through Ideogram.

Then it built me a small local picker. Six options per post, side by side with the current cover, click to choose. When one was close but not right, I edited its prompt in the picker. It re-rendered that one image and swapped it in place. No reload. Once I picked the winners, it optimized each one and pushed it back to Contentful.

Contentful held the posts, and let me drive them from code

The new cover on Why AI is so good at translation.

The Contentful MCP moved the content in and out. Our posts are structured entries, not pages to scrape.

Going in: Claude pulled each post through the MCP and read it, so it knew what the article was about. Coming out: once I picked a cover, Claude uploaded it, set the headerImage, and republished. Same MCP, both directions.

No dashboard. No clicking through 81 entries by hand. The old images stayed in the library, so nothing broke. That is the real value: structured content I can drive from code, not a UI I have to sit in.

Ideogram generated the covers

The new cover on I built an AI board member in Cursor.

Two choices did the heavy lifting.

First, the style. Instead of describing a house look in all 81 prompts and watching it drift, I pinned one custom "poster" model. The style came for free, and every cover matched the next.

Second, the prompts. They stayed short, one line of concept per angle. Ideogram's magic-prompt expanded each one into the finished art direction. I owned the idea, the model owned the styling.

The concepts came from real summaries, so the covers were about the article, not stock art. The two abstract angles were a safety net, a clean fallback when a literal take missed. And renders came back in seconds. That is the only reason iterating across 500 of them was possible.

Why it only took an afternoon

The new cover on Build with AI: let your agent handle notifications end to end.

Total: 500 images generated and reviewed, 81 selected, one afternoon, zero tickets.

The gap between "our blog should look better" and "our blog looks better" used to be weeks and a headcount. Three tools closed it to an afternoon. This is the same reason we ship a Courier MCP: when the plumbing gets out of the way, one person can do a lot, fast.

Go look. The covers are new.