Designer: Timothy Hsu
Publisher: Doubleday
Typefaces: BlockGothic, Univers, and Sonic
Specials: 3 flat color Half tone, Black, Red and White on Silver Foil paper. With Embossing.
Here is a beautiful cover that was featured in 1999's 50 Books, 50 Covers. It's the textures that first drew me into this thing. Below Timothy talks about males wanting to touch the little "bullet hole" marks, and I must admit… I was and still am one of them. But a warning to you… you cannot actually feel any textures if you try and touch this cover on your monitor.
—Jason Gabbert
From Designer Timothy Hsu:
The 4 Phase Man is a suspense thriller action novel, geared towards a male adult audience. Here is a description from the editor:
...."At the height of the cold war, a few elite secret agents earned the title of "4 Phase Man." From Berlin to the Middle East, only two of them survived.... Once he was a man with a family and a home. Then Gerald Goldman rose through the ranks of the CIA with his ability to survive in any situation, and to kill. Now he is called Xenos, the outsider, the exile. But Xenos has just come in from the cold, searching for a missing young man and finding an astounding conspiracy to co-opt the United States government. Between a tough and beautiful U.S. congresswoman who is being forced to betray her country and a deep-cover spy who is aiming at the second-highest office in the land, Xenos finds himself at war. And standing against him is the one man as deadly as Xenos himself: the only other 4 Phase Man in the world...."
The only request I remember from Mr. Pulice, the marketing director and the publisher, was that the book have a masculine, "Big-Book" look. Back then, the biggest seller for Doubleday was John Grisham. My 'Problem' was to elevate this cover from the image driven, storyboard style design approach (like Grisham) to a cleaner, bolder, effect-driven, emotional 'Solution'.
I absorb inspiration from my daily surroundings; people and places I routinely passed by still fascinate me. This book is about a deep-cover agent trying to blend into his surroundings but preying and conspiring his action, so it could be anyone in our daily pass-by. Using this as my metaphor, I stumbled into an old brass ventilation screen at Grand Central Station. An oxidized reddish old screen with silk-screen letters and embossed small warning copies at the near bottom of a wall. The coarsely punched holes on it were irregular, punching through the printed type. The vent was big enough to tunnel a person. This daily object, that was hidden away in a massive building, evokes an uneasy, watchful sensation to any by-passer only if they take a second look. I hoped to recreate the same eerie emotion for the design. Something that is dark and deep enough visually to draw attention.
To me, the most satisfying aspect of this solution is the black dots. Most audiences associate it with bullet holes, and draws closer to touch them. Curiously, males, for some reason, like to touch something punched through or exposed? Thanks to Adam Wahler at A2A for a perfectly executed printed representation of my comp, it took only 1 round to get the board approval. I presented a couple of other ideas involving a character figure (see below).
