A new type­face that is intro­duced with such bad gram­mar (it should be “ele­gantly styled…” and “sophisi­cated” instead of “sophis­ti­cated” is a dead give-away) is off to a bad start. It only takes one look to see that this descrip­tion
… The Silk­stone Sans font was orig­i­nally cre­ated to fill a void in the type­face mar­ket and is aimed at peo­ple look­ing for a clas­sic ele­gant styled mod­ern type­face suit­able for a vast array of projects and designs. Designed and pro­duced by Paul O’Connell of POCT, it is a sans serif type­face cre­ated with many flavours and influ­ences, but still man­ages to retain its orig­i­nal­ity and is a trib­ute to many of today’s mod­ern fonts …
is a load of bol­locks. Silk­stone Sans is an unashamed rip-off of my ITC Offic­ina. Rais­ing the cross­bar on the e a lit­tle and straight­en­ing the top left on the n hardly con­sti­tutes a redesign (the m has been left alone), nei­ther does extrap­o­lat­ing the face to a thin­ner weight. Mak­ing the i-dots square instead of round and tak­ing the serif off the i takes away some of Officina’s strong char­ac­ter with­out adding orig­i­nal­ity, so why bother?

I am sur­prised that no-one at MyFonts saw this. It didn’t take very long after its release that lots of peo­ple saw it, rec­og­nized the deceit and tweeted about it. I am sur­prised that Paul O’Connell has had the nerve to so pub­licly expose his lack of shame. Or has steal­ing some­one else’s work sud­denly become some­thing to brag about?


The orig­i­nal:


The fake: