Caserne balances elegance and exuberance for Montreal’s Museum Ball

The Brand Identity: Calligraphic letterforms sweep through the 2025 identity for the Museum Ball at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts – their gestural warmth sitting within a grid so precise it could belong to an annual report. The coexistence is deliberate. Montreal-based design studio Caserne built the identity for the Ball to speak to two very different audiences simultaneously: a loyal base of corporate donors who have attended for decades and a new generation of cultural patrons the museum is actively courting.

Every design decision – from typeface pairing to colour palette to the weight of the paper stock – traces back to that negotiation. The Museum Ball has held its position as one of Canada’s leading philanthropic events for over 60 years, gathering nearly 1,000 guests and raising over $2 million annually. For its 2025 edition, the identity was been conceived in dialogue with the exhibition Kent Monkman: History is Painted by the Victors, a show that reframes colonial narratives through fluidity, identity and freedom.

That conceptual territory gave Caserne a thematic foundation, but the studio was careful about how directly the exhibition’s visual language filtered into the design work. “The influence was primarily conceptual, not referential,” explains Sébastien Paradis, Partner & Design Director. “We translated that into a design principle rather than a visual quotation.” The team drew on the sense of theatricality and layered storytelling in Monkman’s practice, along with the interplay between control and excess, but intentionally avoided borrowing specific imagery.

The identity exists in dialogue with the exhibition rather than illustrating it. Typography carries much of the identity’s character, and the typeface selection reveals how Caserne navigated the dual-audience challenge at the level of individual letterforms. Ninna anchors the display work. “It stood out because it sits at an interesting intersection,” says Micaël L’Italien, Senior Designer.

“It has a calligraphic softness, almost historical in its construction, yet it avoids nostalgia.” The wordmark evolved through amplification of what was already in the typeface: extending certain swashes, introducing custom ligatures, adjusting spacing and treating letterforms as compositional elements rather than static text. In L’Italien’s words, “typography becomes both a structural and ornamental device.

It anchors the system while also carrying its emotional register.” Underneath this expressive layer, Suisse typefaces provide a rigorous framework with restrained hierarchy and generous spacing, handling the structural work so that Ninna can perform. “On one hand, the system is deliberately disrupted through display typography, colour, scale shifts and layered botanical elements that introduce movement and immediacy,” explains Léo Breton-Allaire, Partner & Creative Director.

Article truncated for readability. Read the full piece →

The article discusses a significant design identity for a notable cultural event, which is relevant to brand strategy professionals, but the concepts of balancing tradition and modernity in design are commonly explored.