Billiard Ball Set
Embedded Files
🎱 scope of design
Idea conceptualization
Graphic design iteration/prototyping
Adobe Illustrator
KeyShot 11 rendering
Hand-painting
Every day the New York City Subway tirelessly weaves the diverse communities of the city together. Like a colorful game of billiards, the subway serves as a medium for the constant, creative, chaotic clash of people reflective of The City That Never Sleeps.
Reimagining the iconic NYC Subway bullets as billiard balls, this design features stripes as express trains and solids as local trains. I designed the graphics on Illustrator and rendered it on KeyShot 11. Stand clear of the closing doors, please!
The physical prototype was displayed at the NYCxDesignxSouvenir in May, 2025.
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Local trains are solids.
Express trains are stripes.
Each suit of solids and stripes are distributed evenly based on local/express train designations. There are 10 solids and 10 stripes, along with 1 cue ball and 1 "8 ball" marked with the new and old MTA logos.
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Process
Graphic Design
A traditional pool ball has a white spot and a black number, whereas an MTA subway line bullet has a colored spot and a black or white number/letter, usually against a black background.
Each initial design iteration aimed to achieve the recognizable aesthetic of pool balls while respecting the color scheme of the MTA bullets. I ultimately ended up using a double border of white and black, so each bullet appeared within a black circle while also enclosed in the white spot of the pool ball.
Early iterations of the graphic for solid balls behind a colored background.
I also tried different widths of the borders, but they didn't look quite right.
At the same time, I tried different versions of the stripe balls. This concept featured a black stripe with colored ends, but it became less recognizable as a pool ball due to the inversion of the traditional colors of a stripe ball, which has a colored stripe and white ends. It also contrasted the design of the stripe balls with the solid balls.
Low-fidelity, quick test renderings were made during the prototyping phase to compare old and new graphics.
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Physical Prototyping
When the design was accepted as part of NYCxSouvenir, I needed to determine a way to make a physical prototype. I initially looked into making a real billiard ball with this design but learned that it would be very costly due to custom molds for each pattern. I decided to take an opposite, hand-made approach by hand-painting all patterns on wooden balls.
I designed a custom 3D printed template to accurately and consistently draw guiding lines to assist in the painting process.
Shaped like a cube, four of the sides have circular templates for each circumference of circles in the design, while the remaining two sides are used to draw the stripes on striped balls. Each piece is held together with wood dowels.
The design was displayed at the NYCxDesignxSouvenir Exhibition in May, 2025
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