Art

I’ve always had an interest in photography, and over the past couple decades, the skills I learned in my dayjob work in desktop publishing and web design ultimately led to me finding ways to use my own photography in various personal design projects. I’ve designed book covers and websites now for several horror authors and publishers, including Delirium Books, Twilight Tales, Bad Moon Books, Dark Arts Books, authors Brian Keene, Brian Pinkerton, Jeff Strand & J.A. Konrath and many more. And, of course, I’ve also worked on my own stuff as well.  I’ve posted my website designs at the bottom of this page. They’re a little archaic at this point, but I also also created a few desktop wallpaper backgrounds for computers. See the lefthand column to download some.

I’ve done the most work and had the most fun, however, designing more than 30 book covers for a variety of small presses. Learning that skill paid off at the start of 2017, when one of my publishers — Samhain Publishing — went out of business and I suddenly had four of my books back in my lap to republish on my own — and I needed to quickly create new covers for them. The same thing happened with a couple of my books from Delirium and Twilight Tales. Consequently… the top, most recent part of this list is heavily weighted towards “Everson” books.   Click on the thumbnails below to see large versions of the front covers, or click the “View Full Art” links to see the full wraparound front and back covers, if available.

Book Covers:

Web Banner Collages & Design

While my Web designs are no longer “live” on most of these sites, you can see the banners I created for them, and a graphic depiction of how the pages looked when they were working site designs below. The most recent site outside of my own that I worked on was Brian Keene’s 2005 site.

Brian Keene Web Collage:

Brian Keene’s publisher, Shane Ryan Staley at Delirium Books, wanted to give Brian a Christmas present for 2005…so he asked me to design a new look for the Keene site. I used, abused and warped and melded the art from two of Brian’s Delirium titles — Earthworm Gods and City of the Dead to create the new look. Keene’s site held facets of this design from December 2005 until early 2010.

Delirium Books 2003-05 Web Collage:

This collage includes images from a house in the New Orleans French Quarter, a church in San Francisco and Resurrection Cemetery, near Chicago (where there are longstanding tales of the ghost of “Resurrection Mary”). It became the top anchor for the Delirium Books Web site at www.deliriumbooks.com, which I also did the 2003-05 design for.

Twilight Tales Web Collage:

Twilight Tales banner

The image above is collaged from the trees in my backyard, as well as my wife’s eyes. It’s a portion of the image that became the Spooks! anthology book cover. The treatment above became the top anchor for the Twilight Tales Web site for a couple years at www.twilighttales.com, which I also did the design for.

 

Kathy Kubik Web Collage:

The image above was simply a photo taken from my hotel room while I was on vacation in Honolulu in 2003. It became the top anchor of poet Kathy Kubik’s site for several years (it’s gone now) at www.kathykubik.com when I was constructing a simple design for her site that could give a feeling of vastness and the eternal.

John Everson.com Web Collages:

This collage includes images from Bourbon Street in the New Orleans French Quarter and San Francisco which were used in the cover of my short story collection Vigilantes of Love, as well as tombstone from the “haunted” Bachelor’s Grove cemetery on the south side of Chicago and a clip from the cover of my first book, Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions. It was the banner graphic for this site in 2003-2004.

This college is based on the artwork that Travis Anthony Soumis did for my 2007 collection Needles & Sins. I loved the “dark angel” so much that I made her my website and e-newsletter visual brand for almost a decade. My designer friend Alina Ciejka Gonciarz helped me design out the whole site around this initial banner that I created, so the site design as a whole is not mine. Which is probably why I loved it so much that it stayed online for almost 10 years.

 

Dark Arts Books Web Collages:

The current version of the Dark Arts Books website has been live (developed in WordPress) since 2010, which means it’s long overdue for a redesign. But like the combination of twisted rope, a raven and dark moon that top the banner.

 

The original version of the Dark Arts Books website was built using SHTML in 2006… and I can’t even run the files in a browser anymore (does anyone remember shtml?). But here’s what the site looked like for its first four (and most active) years:

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