From the makers of Pretendster comes the Ghetto Typeface Family.

Developed in conjunction with SUGO magazine and the Venice Biennial of Visual Arts, Ghetto is a family of three fonts featuring Hebrew and Latin sets complete with numerals, punctuation, accented characters [cantillation marks not included], signs and symbols. In all, 225 characters. Ghetto’s naming convention refers to 16th-century Venice, Italy, home of the world’s first legally separate neighborhood for Jews and its three historic areas of settlement: Ghetto Nuovo, Ghetto Vecchio and Ghetto Novissimo.

The desire to develop these multilingual fonts within the same family, and rendered in the same likeness, directly relates to the history of the term “ghetto” itself.

Though its etymology is uncertain, ghetto is likely derived from either borghetto (“little borough”) or geto (“foundry”) in Venetain dialect which originally described the city’s foundry district, an islet that became gated and guarded when “The Council of Ten” decreed that all Jews reside there from 1516 until 1797 when Napoleon emancipated them. Jewish émigrés – many from Eastern Europe – mispronounced geto with a guttural rather than soft “g”. It wasn’t until World War II that the term ghetto entered the American lexicon.

It’s a pretty hot typeface, if you can figure out how to use it right. Download it here.