TRUE BELIEF

ARCHIVED PUBLICATIONS

Institutional Poems (1 & 2) (2019) · Author: Adam Cruickshank · A6 · 64 pages
Institutional Poems was produced and distributed as part of Terms and Conditions at MUMA and Institutional Poems 2 launched at John Nixon’s A Word Project (Reading Room, 2019)

mouth mouth, to the skin on boiled milk, quail eggs eaten from the hand in fog make everything aphrodisiac · Author: Rachel Schenberg · 120×180mm · 72 pages
Texts written 2017–2019 across Basel, Paris and Rotterdam; collected as a trio of small orange books

TRUE/FALSE tote bags (2018) · Heavy 350gsm cotton · reinforced straps · serious book transport
The original Squash Nord version of the TRUE/FALSE totes were introduced at the 2018 NGV Art Book Fair. In 2019 an Italian version was released and then a Squash Hobo version a few months later

A Parallel Publishing Workshop (1) (2018) · A4 · 84 pages
Produced live during Being As Becoming (Sanne Vaassen and Tim Breukers at Bus Projects), later collated into a book. Co-published with Bus Projects and featuring work by Lizzie Boon, Adam Cruickshank, Will Kollmorgen, Emma Nixon, Rachel Pakula, Lucy Russell

Squash Nord (2018) · A5 · Risograph · With Ned Shannon
Out-of-print zine that introduced Squash Nord. Originally printed in two versions, 2018 and 2019 with minor image changes throughout. Squash Nord documents deformations of Roger Excoffon’s Antique Olive Nord

A– – – –A, B– – – –B and C– – – –C (2014/2016/2018) · 210×260mm
A– – – –A is a photographic exhibition reader that is also the first in a series ostensibly about the dissection of public space. The first publication attempts a parallel mediation of the exhibition Actual Size (a collated archive of published ephemera and modular display structures) at Bus Projects. The second, B– – – –B features contributions from Samuel Heatley. And C– – – –C is the result of a third year workshop (work here by Selena Repanis and Liz Luby) at Monash University developed and co-taught with Alex Margetic

In One Hundred Thousand Yearsw (2017) · 140×190mm · 256 pages · cold glue
This book is a hybrid monograph about Open Spatial Workshop (OSW) and an artist book by Adam Cruickshank. Featuring text contributions from Jon Roffe, Dermot Henry, Spiros Panigirakis, and others. Launched at the NGV with speakers Panigirakis and Helen Hughes. It includes a complete, overprinted and illegible bootleg of Converging in Time. Photos by Matthew Stanton

Table (2016) · Edited by Dell Stewart · Full colour
An exhibition in book form where the graphic design is explicitly curatorial. Contributions from Margaux Williamson, Sarah Weston, Amy Vuleta, Manon Van Kouswijk, Nat Thomas, Dell Stewart, Meredith Turnbull, Tai Snaith, and others

Everything Far Away Can Be Near Again (2014) · Edited by Adam Cruickshank · Tabloid
Newspaper that accompanied exhibition of the same name at Linden Contemporary. Featuring texts from Maria Kunda, Brad Haylock, Ash Kilmartin, Scott Mitchell

The Half-Asleep Pilgrim (2013) · 150×230mm · 144 pages · riso dust jacket · perfect bound
The Half-Asleep Pilgrim and The Half-Asleep Pilgrim 2 (updated edition of the same contents, completely rearranged) are sold out. Artist book and culmination of a performative exhibition of the same name at West Space, Melbourne. This publication is a synthesis of a reading library contributed by 36 artists and friends that was housed in a custom-made workspace available to the public for the duration of the event. The exhibition was a set of rules and structures to determine how the exhibition itself would be remembered, a catalogue-making exhibition

Stitching Time (2013) · 148×210mm · 44 pages · digital · perfect bound
Publication accompanying an exhibition of the same name at Craft, curated by Dell Stewart and Isobel Knowles, with work by Harvest Textiles, Jeremy Dower, Penelope Durston, Rebecca Hayes, Isobel Knowles, Kate Matthews, Dell Stewart, Kayo Taguchi, Maryann Talia Pau and Pauline Tran-Cecil. The book features writing by Phip Murray and Jared Davis

Dodecahedron (2011) · 100 pages · risographed
Publication accompanying exhibition of the same name. Dodecahedron at Platform Contemporary Art Space featured work from Damiano Bertoli, Zoë Croggon, Tony Garifalakis, Joshua Petherick, John Warwicker, Dexter Sinister, Adam Cruickshank, Brad Haylock, Stuart Geddes, Annie Wu, Agatha Gothe-Snape and Oliver Van Der Lugt. The publication featured work from those 12 artists, plus additional contributions from: Terri Bird, Nathan Gray, Christopher LG Hill, Spiros Panigirakis, Tom Polo, Dell Stewart, Masato Takasaka, Nat Thomas and Anna Varendorff

NO FONTS

These fonts are very limited sets, reflecting their contingent and idiosyncratic development as artworks rather than design tools. They have rough spacing and are auto-hinted, and they sit aside from normative type practice. If you want to use them, you’re very welcome, though their commercial utility is likely limited

Museum Dust Regular
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Font design: The world (2025). Inclusions: MuseumDustRegular.otf; Read-me.rtf

Museum Dust (text)

Museum Dust Regular is a font, a cut of a ‘broken’ version of MUMA Regular. Designed by David Pidgeon and Dan Milne, MUMA Regular is Monash University Museum of Art’s recognisable stencil-based brand typeface. While it appears as expected on printed collateral and neon signage, metal versions are also affixed to two different grates on the ground in the courtyard outside MUMA. They each read: IAN POTTER SCULPTURE COURT

Between approximately 2016 and 2024, the letters rearranged themselves in a variety of ways. I was on campus one or two days a week, during semesters, and always looked forward to seeing if the compositions had changed. I photographed the grid-like grates from relatively consistent viewpoints, creating a record that allowed changes to be compared over time.

Perhaps obviously, public typography does not remain as specified once it leaves the screen. On these courtyard grates, the world acts like an uncredited typesetter. As pieces loosen, rotate, bend or disappear, the words undergo a kind of typographic design. While these operations are executed by invisible hands – the disparate range of activities that take place on a university campus – they are also undirected, dispersed field typesetting. This book and its associated freely downloadable typeface are a study of letters that will not stay put, and what that restlessness reveals about ‘identity’ and the social life of typographic form. Accidental shifts accumulate into a distributed human and non-human authorship that remains recognisable even as compliance with the original specification poetically fails at the local level.

Because the typeface is stencil-based, each glyph articulates into discrete modular pieces that move about and deform. The photographic record shows somewhat recurrent patterns. The smallest pieces loosen and creep along the paths of foot traffic, others rotate around their adhesive points, some elements bend while others are lost altogether. Spatial misalignments are relatively frequent. Maybe some pieces ended up in pockets and bags. Read typographically, these movements are not random damage but typesetting: baselines drop, two fragments touch and become a rough ligature, kerning adjusts itself in unexpected ways, a missing piece opens a counter into an aperture. Even the gridded grates, those familiar structures trying to keep it together, could not prevent the letters from tripping into haphazard scatter. (In hindsight I should have volunteered to keep the rejected fragments that were likely sent to landfill after they were replaced).

In 2024 the lettering was briefly replaced with a HELVETICA version and then about a week later the stencil (which itself is based on HELVETICA) reappeared. I don’t know why exactly – most likely a routine error – but the effect was jarring. HELVETICA’S contiguous glyphs lessen the likelihood of pieces being dislodged, so legibility and persistence probably improved, but a different kind of obscurity resulted: one of recognition rather than function. The break in type disrupted continuity with MUMA’s identity and even with the typographic drift the site had come to perform, at least for me.

There aren’t examples of every letter on site, but I wanted Museum Dust Regular to evoke the chance interventions and surprising arrangements of the originals. As I have access to the digital files of MUMA Regular, I began recreating them by moving around the constituent pieces within each glyph to complete a new set. The reconstructions followed some constraints. I worked only with the existing pieces from MUMA Regular, repositioning or rotating them and very occasionally omitting them. Edits were limited to displacements and losses that were plausible within the behaviours I observed on site. The result was mapped to two alphabets on the upper and lower keys. Both contain capital forms. The upper-key set preserves a level of legibility while the lower-key doesn’t. Together they show how design can be translated and edited by the world, from a series of fixed states to a spatially dispersed concrete poem of letter fragments that express it.

Each misalignment or rotation reads as evidence of use and activity. Museum Dust Regular is an endpoint in the documentation process, but one that refuses conventional utility. Its value is not legibility or application, but the preservation of a specific visual grammar. It is a system of identity design translated into a system of its own dissolution

This project is an open-edition artwork and accompanies the small publication Museum Dust (True Belief, 2025)

Reading Matter Regular
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Font design: Megan Duong (2025). Inclusions: ReadingMatter-Regular.ttf; Read-me.rtf

Reading Matter (text)

This is an introduction to Reading Matter set in Reading Matter Regular, a font made by Reading Matter participant Megan Duong. Megan extracted letterforms from our shared image commons and assembled them into a functional .ttf file. In one sense we all made the font, because we all contributed to the commons from which it takes its shapes, a collaboratively built pool of images and texts shared for reuse within the project, but really, Megan made it. Drawing on corporate comms and a range of para institutional voices, the font does not resolve into a single voice, even though of course it must. It stages heteroglossia, multiple registers held in productive tension, so reading remains an encounter with difference rather than with perhaps more familiar tones: uniformity, homogenisation, even branding. Each glyph bears a grain of its source: edge roughness, documentation angles, halftone residue. Through repetition across words, provenance is kept faintly visible even if the direct lineage has been disappeared.

What follows is less a display face than a site specific writing system. Each letter is fixed to one found source at and around GPG; noticeboards, poles, doors, windows, so sameness holds within individual characters concurrently with the difference between their specific visual languages. Because legibility depends on iterability, a sign repeats across contexts while retaining traces that never fully coincide. This font hints at that structural non identity. The .ttf inevitably imposes shared metrics and baselines, but plurality persists locally, in stroke logic, proportions and spacing, so heteroglossia is sustained without completely collapsing readability. Or, Reading Matter Regular hosts other alphabets inside itself. It might literally draw from numerous other fonts, even languages, but they’re all Latin, it should be noted. Can a font propose a modest ethics of coexistence without assimilation, where the letters each approach the other by holding forms in proximity rather than converting them to house styles, or worse? Maybs

The above text, (Adam Cruickshank), was originally published in Reading Matter and is included here for context. While Reading Matter Regular is free, the publication is available for sale from GPG with proceeds donated to the Occupied Palestinian Territory Humanitarian Fund administered by the UN

Squash Nord 38/20
Download Squash Nord
Font design: Adam Cruickshank (2018). Inclusions: SquashNord_38percent.otf; SquashNord_20percent.otf; Read-me.rtf

Squash Nord (text)

Squash Nord is a variation of Roger Excoffon’s iconic Antique Olive Nord, designed in 1962. Squash Nord is a simple ‘squash’ of Excoffon’s typeface. It comes in two display weights of limited character sets – 38% (for general use) and 20% (for large sizes). Squash Nord documents the already common practice of squashing Nord.

While bold condensed and compact versions of Antique Olive are available, they do not include the idiosyncrasies that result from a direct squash. These features include exaggerated overshoots, extreme horizontal stress and odd characteristics in individual letters, such as the newly-strange curves of the S. These are the qualities Squash Nord seeks to conserve and disseminate. Apart from some slightly adjusted punctuation marks and the addition of a euro glyph, these anomalies remain unaltered

This project is an open-edition artwork (profits from sales of the zine that originally distributed this font were donated to the Asylum Seekers Resource Centre)

These fonts are available under something like CC BY-NC-SA. This licence enables reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format for noncommercial purposes only, but we don’t really care about attribution, go nuts. If you adapt or build upon the material, you should license the modified material under the same terms.

ABOUT

True Belief is a small, informal, independent, profit-averse art publisher. Initially instigated as a repository for artist books and catalogues for friends – and while remaining attentive to these non-professional beginnings – True Belief has grown increasingly concerned with the relationships between contemporary art practice and its methods of explication, dissemination, and preservation

Publications are generally unnumbered/unsigned and although print runs are necessarily small, editions are usually considered open

True Belief acknowledges and pays respect to the Wurundjeri people, traditional custodians of the land we work on. Aboriginal sovereignty has never been ceded — always was, always will be

Email: enquiry@truebelief.com.au
True Belief is mostly organised by Adam Cruickshank but dozens of people have contributed over the years, including:

Xavier Antin, Peter Barrett, Damiano Bertoli, Terri Bird, Lizzie Boon, Tim Breukers, Kim Brockett, Angela Brophy, Bree Claffey, Zoë Croggon, Jared Davis, Jeremy Dower, Nic Dowse, Megan Duong, Penelope Durston, Kelly Fliedner, Tony Garifalakis, Stuart Geddes, Channon Goodwin, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Nathan Gray, Paul Green, Rebecca Hayes, Brad Haylock, Sam Heatley, Dermot Henry, Bianca Hester, Lily Hibberd, Christopher LG Hill, Rachael Hooper, Helen Hughes, Andy Hutson, Robert Janes, Natasha Johns-Messenger, Anusha Kenny, Ash Kilmartin, Isobel Knowles, Will Kollmorgen, Annika Koops, Abbra Kotlarczyk, Manon Van Kouswijk, Maria Kunda, Frans Van Lent, Phoebe Ruiqi Li, Zichuan Liu, Hugh Magnus, Alex Margetic, Drew Martin, Dylan Martorell, Kate Matthews, Ian Milliss, Scott Mitchell, Emma Nixon, Pat O’Brien, Rachel Pakula, Spiros Panigirakis, Maryann Talia Pau, Casey Payne, Simon Pericich, Selena Repanis, Lewellyn Riley-Haynes, Jon Roffe, Ilia Rosli, Donald Russell, Lucy Russell, Jack Sam, Rachel Schenberg, Ned Shannon, Dexter Sinister, Vivian Smith, Tai Snaith, Kailai Song, Matthew Stanton, Dell Stewart, Kya Su, Kayo Taguchi, Masato Takasaka, Gabe Tejada, Harvest Textiles, Nella Themelios, Nat Thomas, Julia Thouas, Pauline Tran-Cecil, Meredith Turnbull, Sanne Vaassen, Anna Varendorff, Oliver Van Der Lugt, Amy Vuleta, Ian Wadley, Helen Walter, John Warwicker, Sarah Weston, Margaux Williamson, Benjamin Woods, Annie Wu, Emile Zile