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Truus is a humanistic sans serif that comes with two sets of families in three weights. Inspired by Vilém Flusser’s book Does Writing Have a Future?, the type was originally drawn with a witch pen. The resulting font is characterized by the application and removal of the pen’s nib, which reflect Flusser’s thoughts of breaks and crises in the creative process.

Rade Matić is 35 years old and a cofounder of the studio »Drei meiner Kollegen« in Mannheim, Germany.

Can you tell us what inspired you to develop Truus & TruusTruant?
It had been Vilém Flusser’s book "Does Writing Have a Future?".
I wanted to design a font during my studies. A friend recommended the book to me when I was working on my thesis—the Truus font. I had already finished the design for small letters. This book inspired me to create two font families, with and without breaks or gaps in the design, and it cleared my thoughts about what I was doing. This book pushed my knowledge of type design to a new level.

Your release contains a twin-family set. Tell us more about their relations as well as about their differences.
When I was working on the design of stencil family (Truus Truant), I developed the idea to close the gaps and to modify a few glyphs because it made the font more legible. Truus is a supplementary font that is characterized by an increased functionality and legibility.

What is the main idea/concept behind designing those twin-families?
Without doubt, I put a lot of thoughts in the design of Truus, the single glyphs and the font. Flusser describes crises in his book; he describes breaks and reflections during a creative process as writing with a feather, pen or hammer and pick. This led to my idea to show this moment of application and removal even before I was fully aware of them.

Please explain something about the difficulties you faced during the process of developing two families in one, with all their 3 weights each.
I faced a lot of challenges, but the main one was to find time to work continuously on the fonts.

Your font comes along with some kind of uncommon family names. Can you explain what led you to this particular naming?
The original name was Heinrich Truus—Heinrich Truus (HT) and Heinrich Truus Trunt (HTT). HTT is the stencil-like font and HT is the sans serif. Heinrich is an allusion to a very good friend who always helped me during my work on Truus and my thesis. Truus is the name of Luis van Gaal’s wife and also a time reference because when I drew the first sketches of Truus, Luis van Gaal, coach of the Bayern Munich football club at the time, left the team and later Jupp Heynckes took over the role. It is also a reminiscence of my time at the Berlin Weissensee School of Art and of the Dutch professor. I like the word Truant for which it stands for the stencil cut. For the Gestalten publishing house, I had to think of a new name because for example “Heinrich Truus Truant Regular” is too long for a font name. So, the names Truus and Truant were decided on.

What ideal usage of your font do you have in mind? Or don’t you have any expectations for the users?
At first, I hope people like Truus and they have fun working with it. I think either font styles can be used in a different context and in various applications. For me personally, it would be really cool to see Truus on the back of football shirts.

Truus & TruusTruant is your first font release. What are your future plans/projects?
I would like to increase the practical value by adding more glyphs and OpenType features. At the moment, the Western standard encoding is available.