Every year the Creative Review magazine commissions someone to come up with a new design of a capital ‘A’ for the cover of their Annual. This year typographer Craig Ward got together with Frank Conrad, an immunologist at the University of Colorado in Denver, for this example of what they’re calling ‘cell-level typography’.

They made a mould of an ‘A’ and then grew pollen cells inside it to produce this image.

“Our original choice was to use Chinese Hamster ovary cells,” says Ward (Creative Review blog). “But the techniques we were using proved too much for them and they died, en masse, every time we went to check them. The solution was to use pollen as the cells themselves are graphic and cool-looking.”

Now we’ve got the A, it’s surely only a matter of time before the first complete cell-level typeface. But what are we going to call this? I’m going with cell-vetica.

The May issue of Creative Review is out now.

See also: Making of… The Creative Review Annual Cover 2010

Image: Creative Review