This work proposes a novel heuristic scheme to approximate the optimal design of truss structures. The contribution of the proposed scheme is its capability to obtain a nearly optimal solution of a truss design problem within an acceptable computational time. In the proposed scheme, a heuristic search is a key process to speed up the computations. The idea of the heuristic search is that it transforms the multi-variable truss design problems into one-variable optimization ones. In doing so, the computational time in searching solutions can be reduced to the minimum. Several truss design problems were selected from the literature for performance tests of the heuristic scheme. The analytical results indicate that the solutions obtained by the proposed scheme differ by less than 1 from those obtained by traditional structural optimization methods.