Design your own event tickets on Sway, legal details included

Organisers on Sway can now design the PDF ticket of their events. You upload your artwork, Sway draws a secure zone on top of it with the QR code and the mentions a ticket has to show, and you place that zone where it suits the design. Every buyer receives a ticket that looks like your event, and nothing you change can break the scan at the door or the information the law asks for.

Three A4 layouts to start from

Every ticket stays an A4 page, so it prints on any home printer and opens the same on any phone. You pick the layout that fits the artwork you already have:

• A4 with your artwork: your visual fills the page, the secure zone is a band you can move.
• A4 poster card: your poster fills the page and the zone floats as a card you place anywhere.
• A4 classic with your conditions: a white page with the secure zone as a header, your artwork in the middle and your own conditions text printed at the bottom.

No artwork yet? Leave Use the event poster when there is no artwork on and the ticket takes the event's own poster, blurred, as its background.

Your artwork, Sway's secure zone

The editor shows your artwork with the zone over it. Drag the zone to place it: its size is fixed and it always stays inside the page. It works the same with a mouse on a laptop and with a finger on a phone.

The zone carries what a ticket has to prove: the QR code, the event, the date and the venue, the ticket type, the price paid including the service fee, the holder's name, the ticket number and the organiser. A free ticket, a guestlist invitation and a ticket bought with a coupon say so, instead of printing a list price nobody paid.

You choose how the zone looks over your artwork, Light, Dark or Glass, and its accent colour. If a colour would make the text hard to read on the zone, Sway corrects it rather than printing an illegible ticket.

One template for every event

A promoter can save its designs as templates on the promoter page and use them on all its events. Make one the default and every event paid out to that promoter prints with it until it gets a design of its own.

The link is live: change the template and the tickets of every event that follows it change too. An event can also detach from the template and keep its current look as its own design, to adjust it for one night.

A design per ticket type and per language

A VIP ticket can look different from a regular one: each ticket type can have its own design, and the others follow the event's. You can also add a version per language, for instance a poster whose text is translated. A buyer gets the version in the language they bought in, and the secure zone's labels follow that language too.

Check it before you sell

Test PDF opens the current design filled with sample data and your event's real title, date and venue, so you can print it and look at it on paper before sales open. Its QR code reads that it is not a ticket.

If you design in your own tool, Download the template gives the blank page of each layout with the secure zone marked where you placed it: SVG for Figma and Illustrator, PNG, PDF, a layered PSD for Photoshop, Photopea and Canva, or a ZIP with all of them and the dimensions. Design on the artwork layer, export the page, upload it.

Made to be scanned, and to stay legal

A custom ticket is only useful if it works at the door. So a few things never move, whatever the design:

• One code per ticket. The QR code is printed by Sway, black on a white plate with its margin, at a size every scanner reads. An artwork that contains another QR code is refused at upload.
• The real price. The ticket states what the buyer paid, service fee included, as consumer rules on ticket resale ask.
• The organiser. The promoter that sells the ticket is printed on it, with its company name and number when it is a company.
• The Sway mark. The Sway wordmark, black or white to match the zone, is printed on every ticket. Promoters on a plan with white-label ticketing (Studio and Roster) get tickets without it.
• A harder copy. Optional anti-copy micro-text repeats the holder's name and the ticket number in very small type behind the zone's text. A photocopy or a screenshot blurs it, which helps door staff when a printout looks doubtful.

Getting started

Open your event in Backstage, go to Tickets, then the Design tab. Promoter templates live under the promoter page's Settings, on the Ticket templates tab. The whole editor is described step by step in the Ticket Design documentation.

New to Sway? Create your promoter page, put your first event on sale, and send tickets that look like your night.