Apple has released Pass Designer, a dedicated utility for designing passes that appear in Apple Wallet on iPhone and Apple Watch. According to Apple's developer documentation, the tool is intended for organizations ranging from local fitness centers and music venues to global airlines and national coffee chains, allowing them to craft passes that reflect their brand identity.
The design process begins with templates provided by Apple or with custom designs created in external tools. Users can import images such as logos, backgrounds, or strip images into Pass Designer to complete the pass layout. As edits are made, the application updates a live preview that uses the same rendering engine as iOS and watchOS, ensuring that what is shown in the editor matches exactly what customers will see on their devices. This device-faithful preview is the central feature that distinguishes Pass Designer from earlier web-based PKPass wizards.
Pass Designer includes controls for adjusting background, foreground, and label colors, and supports adaptable layouts that take advantage of the latest advances in Apple Wallet while maintaining backward compatibility. Each pass type comes with standard fields for displaying information, which can be edited directly within the tool. As users work, Pass Designer validates the pass in real time, alerting them to issues such as missing required key values or unexpected definitions.
For boarding passes and event tickets, the tool supports semantic tags that add structured data—such as event dates, venue locations, or flight details—to enable system-level features like Siri Suggestions, Calendar integration, and Maps directions. Semantic tags can be edited directly in the user interface, and users can view a semantic and non-semantic version of the pass side by side. Pass Designer can also automatically generate a backward-compatible pass structure from semantic data, ensuring the pass remains functional in contexts where semantic tags are not supported.
The image illustrates how Pass Designer enables users to create event ticket passes with editable semantic tags that power features like Siri Suggestions, Calendar integration, and Maps directions, as described in the article.
The Pass Designer beta is available for download on macOS 27 or later. Users must sign in with an Apple Account and, if prompted, complete the free registration and accept the Apple Developer Agreement. No public release date for the final version has been announced.