According to designer’s opinion, Mr. Bohdan Hdal, one of the fonts on the new 1000-hryvnia note, presented in June by the National Bank of Ukraine, was stolen.
He claimed that the inscription “One Thousand hryvnia” was written in Adobe’s Bickham Script font, which was designed by designer Richard Lipton in 1997.
The Cyrillic version of the font was published only in 2016.
Thus, if someone used the font before this year, then it was only “pirated” modifications since the font license directly prohibits any modification of letterforms and their reprinting.
“During visual analysis and trying to find the trails of such a discrepancy, a series of fonts called Bickham Script One, Bickham Script Two, Bickham Script Three, signed by the name of the Russian Alexandra Hofman, was found on the network. As it turned out, in font circles she is fairly well known as the author of stolen versions of fonts, which she signed under her name and then distributed free of charge without the permission of the authors. She designed the Bickham Script stolen series in 2005”, Mr. Hdal noted on his Facebook page.
Later, the NBU issued an official statement that this information does not correspond to reality.
“One of the design features of hryvnia banknotes is that all the images on the banknotes are the author’s graphics. The artists working on their design do not use ready-made drawings or fonts – they create vector graphic design elements, including the lettering of banknote denomination, with their own hands. Using copyright works instead of finished products is provided to ensure a high level of security of banknotes because it is more difficult to fake an author’s image than to copy a finished image”, the NBU Press Office reported.
The similarity of the font in the National Bank was explained by the fact that in the process of creating graphic images, designers studied graphic information from open sources, and then created their own creation with the addition of the author’s vision of certain elements.
The official position of Adobe on this issue has not been released yet.