Designing Art Book Covers with AI: Story by John DiBiase

To stay relevant nowadays, embracing innovation and learning new tools is critical for content creators. At Depositphotos, we proudly support enthusiasts who maintain independent media platforms and personal artistic projects. That’s why we launched AI Image Generator—a one-click tool that enables endless experiments with styles, colors, and objects and simplifies ongoing content production.

In a series of interviews, event organizers, media creators, and artists shared stories of how the generative tool came in handy for their projects, transforming the way they execute creative tasks. Today, the spotlight is on John DiBiase—a digital media pro, designer, and freehand artist who used AI Image Generator to get unique imagery that was lacking in stock photography libraries.

Continue scrolling to explore John’s way of generating pictures and combining his artworks with AI-powered design elements.

John DiBiase is a digital media specialist and a freehand artist with a lifelong passion for drawing. In the 2010s, John began selling prints and later contributed sketch card artwork for Topps, including “Star Wars”, “Stranger Things”, and MLB collections. Based in Bethlehem, PA, he continues his art practices and manages jesusfreakhideout.com—one of the world’s largest Christian music resources founded by him in the 90s.

johndibiase.com

Reinventing creativity—A digital media specialist’s story

“Back when I was in high school, I started a Christian music website jesusfreakhideout.com (JFH), and became its CEO, Editor, Writer, and Designer. Soon, I went on to study advertising and design, and out of college, I worked for a local web-based company called InfoGenius. In 2006, I left to take my website full-time, and in 2011, I rekindled my passion for drawing realistic pencil portraits and started trying to build that up as a side hustle.

With the decline of the music industry in the late 2000s and art not taking off as fast as I needed it to, I found myself back at the same company in 2015, where they had launched AlertBot in the time I was away. Being back on board, I took on the title of Digital Media Specialist and specialized in social media management and article writing, as well as graphics creation for websites and social media. For our campaigns, stock imagery was needed.”

“I signed up with Depositphotos to expand my access to higher quality images for social media and web design. Because the AI Image Generator was included, I figured it was worth trying out.”

From mayhem to unique masterpieces—John DiBiase’s AI art adventure

In the fall of 2024, John DiBiase put together a book of sketches he had made. However, he soon discovered that he couldn’t quite find the stock imagery for the cover art.

“I used the AI Image Generator to get images that, after some manual editing, became part of the front and back covers of my book.”

The artist generated a desktop with a keyboard, notepad, and some sticky notes. Since the keyboard had nonsensical markings on it, he had to make some changes for it to resemble a real one.

“For the back of the book, I asked for pencils and notepads and it gave me a pencil cup with pencils in it. However, where the pencils met inside the cup was a swirling mess of mayhem, so I darkened the area. On the other hand, it has given me something I couldn’t otherwise find in stock imagery!”

DiBiase also put a few prop images inside the book to accentuate his pages.

“The sketches featured in the book were ones I’d done years ago, inspired by my working in an office setting. So I designed the book to look as though you were paging through a notebook where the sketches—which were originally done on sticky notes—were sticky notes stuck to lined sheets of paper, so some pages had cookie crumbs on them, or a CD, or bubble gum, or even a LEGO brick.”

The AI Image Generator as a tool for creative exploration

For his music site, the artist used AI Image Generator a couple of times to create podcast cover backgrounds.

“Flexibility is an asset for image creation. As an artist, however, I don’t think it’s fair to type words into an AI generator and call whatever it spits out your own art (As some actually do).”

John DiBiase claims that generative AI is a good tool to use for problem-solving—but not to create art that one can call their own, as with artworks created using stock photography as a main source. What matters here is generative AI’s ability to create unique images quickly using precise descriptions.

“I’d recommend varying your descriptive words when generating an image, and keep regenerating until you get what you’re looking for.”

“My advice is—if you’re looking for ‘a duck eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich,’ you may either want to regenerate the results a couple of times to find what you’re looking for, or you can add more keywords to get more specific results, like ‘a duck in a top hat eating a really big peanut butter sandwich with a blue sky in the background and a busy highway full of cars.’ You can keep adjusting your wording to see how it changes the results.”

Wrapping up. Starting your creative journey with AI

In 2025, visual creativity comes in many forms, with generative AI being both a tool for content production optimization and a valuable source of new aesthetics (check out the Creative Trends 2025 report for more insights).

John DiBiase’s story proves that AI Image Generator can successfully merge with other tools for creating visuals, including pencils and sketchbooks, design editors you already work with, and stock libraries. So why not try integrating the tool into your creative workflow right away? Note—with each Depositphotos plan, you get unlimited image generation, so if you haven’t started with one yet, now is the time.

More about AI Image Generator:

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A Guide to Using AI Art in Marketing Campaigns for 2025

Amazing Images Generated with Depositphotos AI: Collection & Tips to Craft Your Own

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