Make a launch poster with the model it announces

The launch image for Nano Banana 2 Lite cost $0.05 and took seven seconds to generate. We made it with Lite itself, on the first try.

That last part is the story. A launch poster used to mean a photographer, a set, a prop budget, and a retoucher. This one needed a slapstick brief: an older man mid-fall in a sterile office, coffee frozen in the air, a banana peel blurred in the foreground, and the product name printed across the top. One prompt handled all of it, headline included.

Here is the exact recipe, because the same three moves work for any promo image.

Move 1: anchor on a reference, then say what to ignore

We started from a reference image that had the pose and the office we wanted. Passing a reference to an image model is a trap if you stop there. The model treats the reference as every signal at once. Logos, watermarks, text overlays, and the original crop all bleed into your output unless you say otherwise.

The fix is to open the prompt with an explicit contract:

Use the reference image as the COMPOSITION and STYLE source only.
Keep: the pose idea of a man mid-fall toward the camera, the sterile
bright office hallway, the clean poster layout, the corporate grade.
Ignore everything else from the reference, including any watermarks,
logos, text overlays, and the original vertical framing.

Two lists, keep and ignore. Positive instructions beat negative ones here: "clean frame" works where "don't add a watermark" fails.

Move 2: describe the scene like a photographer

After the contract, brief the scene the way a photographer would. Not "funny man slips on banana". This:

A heavyset man in his late 60s, gray thinning hair, bushy mustache,
rumpled beige suit, slips backward mid-fall directly toward the camera,
mouth wide open in comic shock. A white ceramic coffee cup flies out of
his hand, dark coffee splashing frozen in mid-air. In the extreme
foreground a yellow banana peel, heavily out of focus, fills the bottom
edge of the frame. Shot on RED cinema camera, 35mm, f/2.8, the man
tack-sharp, the peel soft-blurred. Cool clinical high-key grade.

Every concrete detail you skip is a decision the model makes for you, and it fills those gaps with glossy defaults. Camera language does real work. "f/2.8, the man tack-sharp, the peel soft-blurred" is the line that put the banana out of focus.

Move 3: quote the text you want, word for word

Models that render text still need the exact words in quotes. We ended the prompt with:

Headline text at the top center in clean black sans-serif: the words
'Nano Banana 2' on the first line, and below it the single word 'LITE'
larger and in italic. No other text, no logos, no watermarks, clean frame.

The headline came out legible and straight on the first generation. Short strings work best, and the Nano Banana family is one of the few that gets typography right at all. Keep it to a few words per line and quote them exactly.

The economics of the first try

Lite is a flat $0.05 per image at every aspect ratio. Standard Nano Banana 2 starts at $0.09 at 1K. Prices are live rates at publish time.

The poster above landed in one take, so the whole art direction cost a nickel. It usually takes more tries than that, and the failure math is the point. Ten attempts on Lite cost $0.50, which still buys less than the first minute of a photographer's time. Iterate on Lite, and when a draft deserves more resolution, re-run the winning prompt on the standard model. Our routing guide covers when each tier earns its cost.

A launch poster is one well-structured prompt away. Contract the reference, brief the scene like a photographer, and quote the headline word for word.