Germán Olaya was born in Bogotá, Columbia, and started his approach to design through typography, when he got Fontographer and began to design typefaces in the middle 1998. Eventually, that took him to develop his own site Typo5 -www.typo5.com- , a personal place to put his creations and display his work.
Typo5 started mainly as small type foundry based in Colombia, and eventually evolved to showcase all his experiments with graphics and all the web stuff. His typefaces have received accolades from around the world and and have been used worldwide in all medias from magazines, rockbands/music industry, books, publications, tv, snowboards, and Hollywood movies.
In 2000 he launched the second version of Typo5 which took him to meet great designers from many places and grow his skill set from them. In that same year he met Thomas Brodhal a kick-ass designer from Luxembourg and got involved with him and Yohan Gingras in the creation of Surfstation, a design ezine which in some months became an international successful and exciting project, becoming a daily stop for many designers.
His artwork is well-known for its special characteristics of combining digital art with typefaces.
Using dirty decos, contrast of bold shapes and unique mix of type and photography makes his showcase very impressive. Olaya´s work has been featured in numerous books and magazines around the world, from USA, UK, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Holland, México and France.
He has been invited speaker for typography seminars in South America, and displayed his work at exhibits in NY, Japan, Europe and the Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá (MAMBO),
Olaya´s work has received various awards, including the Platinum Award in 2000 AYCC from Agfa in Belgium, a Bronze award in 2002 CYCC from Canon, in Japan, and the Benetton Award at Fabrica in 2004, in Italy.
