Picture a logo animation that looks lovely on a laptop. Soft gradient background, a subtle lens flare, the wordmark easing in from the left. Now load it onto a hologram fan in a shopfront window. The gradient lights up the whole disc into a hazy circle. The flare becomes a smudge. The wordmark sits inside a glowing blob, and nobody on the footpath gives it a second look.
Now picture the rebuild, which takes about an afternoon. Pure black background. The client’s product, say a perfume bottle, rendered in 3D and turning slowly. Nothing else. This is the version that makes people outside stop with their phones up, trying to work out how a bottle can float behind the glass.
Same hardware, same window. The only difference is the design.
Your canvas is a circle of light
A hologram fan draws with LEDs on spinning blades. The eye merges the flashes into a single image, and anything the LEDs don’t light stays empty. That’s the whole trick, and it rewrites a few rules most of us take for granted in web and screen work.
There’s no background colour, because there’s no screen. There are no corners, because the blades sweep a circle. And brightness, rather than pixel resolution, is often the first thing viewers notice.
Rule one: black means air
Treat #000000 as transparency. Every truly black pixel is a gap the viewer sees straight through, and that’s what sells the float. Near-black is a trap. A background at #0a0a0a or a dark vignette lights the LEDs just enough to show a faint disc, and the object stops floating and starts sitting on a dim plate.
Check your exports in a levels or histogram view. The background should sit hard against zero.
Rule two: one hero, lots of space
The strongest hologram content has one subject. A shoe, a logo, a mascot, a bottle. Give it room around the edges so the viewer’s eye reads it as an object in space instead of a picture in a frame. If you’re tempted to add a tagline, a price burst and a second product, make three separate loops and let the playlist rotate them.
Rule three: design for the circle
Most fans take a square video, but only the circle inscribed inside it is visible. Anything in the corners disappears. Build a circular safe zone into your artboard template and keep critical content well inside it, since the outermost ring is where the image is least forgiving.
Rule four: use motion to show depth
The floating object feels three-dimensional when motion and lighting tell the eye it has volume. Slow rotation is the classic move for good reason. A 3D render turning through 360 degrees, with a key light that shifts across its surfaces, reads as solid in a way a flat logo never will.
Keep camera moves minimal. The fan is the camera. Fast cuts and strobing effects fight the way the image is built and tire viewers out quickly.
Rule five: give colour room to glow
Saturated colour looks spectacular on a fan: deep reds, electric blues, clean greens. Dark, muddy tones do the opposite, because dark on this medium simply means dim. If the brand palette leans navy or charcoal, lift it for the hologram version. The client will forgive a brighter navy much sooner than an invisible one.
Rule six: go big and bold with type
Thin weights break up as they spin. Use heavy weights, generous tracking and short words. Two or three words at a time is plenty. If the message needs a paragraph, it belongs on a sign next to the display.
Where the hardware pays you back
Good design gets you most of the way. Good hardware makes it sing.
LED density is what separates a crisp edge from a jagged one. Holofex’s HoloU65 Ultra runs 1280 LEDs across a 65 cm fan, and the difference shows in exactly the places designers care about: curves stay smooth, small serifs hold their shape, and the fine highlights on a glossy product render survive the trip from After Effects to the air.
Brightness is the other half. The Ultra Series is up to four times brighter than Holofex’s Basic Series, and its LEDs hit 2800 cd/m². That’s what keeps your carefully chosen reds red in a shopfront window at midday and stops the floating image from turning pale under expo lighting. When you’ve fought for a saturated palette, you want hardware that shows it off.
Holofex is a holographic device company, founded in 2021, that builds its displays for retail and events. If you want the mechanics behind the image before you open your motion software, its explainer on how 3d hologram fans create a floating picture is a quick, useful read.
Test in the room, not on your monitor
Your monitor is lying to you about this medium. Load a draft onto a real fan as early as you can, and view it in conditions close to the final venue. Stand where shoppers will stand. Walk past at normal speed. Look from off to the side. You’ll catch problems that no preview window will show you, like a gradient that glows, an edge that crowds the rim, or a loop that’s too long for a passer-by.
Reusing the assets you already have
Web and ecommerce teams usually own more usable material than they realise. 3D product renders from a WooCommerce or Shopify catalogue are a head start. So are brand marks in vector form and mascot rigs from social campaigns. Strip the backgrounds to pure black, centre the subject, add a slow turn, and you have a first draft.
Holofex also offers Studio and AI Holo Lab tools for building hologram content, which is handy when there’s no motion designer on the job.
The payoff
Get the design right and the result is striking: a bright, sharp object suspended in the air, turning slowly, with nothing around it. People slow down, lean closer and try to find the trick, and then they film it. For a designer, it’s a rare chance to make work that people physically walk towards.
