Now You See It, Now You Don’t
What does it mean to have a hologram challenge coin? As much as we’d like it to, it doesn’t mean your coin will project a holographic image of someone in the palm of your hand like on Black Panther. That particular technology might be too advanced for us, but the future is still now!
A hologram challenge coin is a coin with a lenticular image placed on one or both of the coin faces. While the name may not strike a bell for you, lenticular images are something you’ve gotten used to seeing from early childhood. Any picture that shows you one thing when you look at it straight on, and then something different when you tilt the image is a lenticular image. And it’s these images, placed on a challenge coin, that create what we refer to as hologram challenge coins.
How’d You Do That?
You know, by now, about the process by which our coins are minted. When creating lenticular image coins, an extra step is added to the process. Namely, the image has to be created for each coin and then set into place.
For the creation of the image, the two images the customer wants to morph into one another are each blended in a process called interlacing. This way, the two different images form one image and occupy the same amount of space within the coin. The interlaced images are then printed out and adhered to the backside of a lenticular lens. It’s this lens that gives these images their trademark grooves felt when you run a fingernail across the top of the image.
Once the image is created and cut to the shape it needs to be to go on the coin, it’s perfectly fit into place in a recess created by the coin mold specifically to house the final image. With the lenticular image in place, the coins are ready to go through the same QA process all of our coins are put through to make sure they’re as perfect as possible. The entire process adds four to five days to the overall production time of your coins.
The Results
The UBS Wealth Advice Center had these coins created for their employees. The lenticular image on one of the coin faces transitions between the words UBS Advice Advantage and the image of a speech bubble. As a wealth management and advice firm, the speech bubble holds significant importance to UBS.
It’s not only corporate clients making use of hologram challenge coins either. For their commander’s coin for excellence, the 99th Security Forces Squadron also decided to include a lenticular image.
The 99th Security Forces Squadron provides flight-line security, police services and antiterrorism/force protection for Nellis AFB and Creech AFB. Located on the outskirts of Las Vegas, the pilots chose the Vegas skyline as one of the images in their hologram. For the other, they choose the unit insignia of a scorpion on a green and blue field. One of the cool things about this lenticular image is that the scorpion is visible no matter which image you’re seeing at the time.
Get Your Own Lenticular Image Coins
As is the case with all of the coins we create, these lenticular image coins aren’t for sale. The only people capable of receiving them are the people with the 99th Security Forces Squadron and employees at UBS who earn them. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get your own collection of cool coins with holographic images.
When you talk to our sales team and tell them what you’re hoping to get out of your coins, mention the possibility of a lenticular, or hologram, image and let us do the rest. At most, you’ll need to tell us what two images you want to make up the lenticular image of your coin, but with that information, our art team can work wonders. If you’re looking to kick your next challenge coin order up a notch, let us know.
