Tips for decreasing file size for a flash banner

August 13, 2007 at 7:01 pm

For one of our assignments for webmarketing class, we needed to create an approx. 15 sec. flash web banner under 40K. It was surprisingly challenging, since whenever I decrease the file size, I end up with low image quality, since there is less data stored in the bytes. 40 K is definately small, so every K counts!

Here are some tips I found:

1. Optimize your raster images in Photoshop first. Use the save for web and devices option. Play around with the settings. I suggest using JPEG compression since I found it to produce the better quality for the size. If you use blur, it makes some of the quality loss less visible, but don’t over do it.
2. In Flash, don’t embed fonts! Break your fonts apart. Yes, it does mean you can’t edit them after but this is the quick and dirty way. Once it is broken apart, the fonts turn into vector, which makes like a 5 K difference. (I know big whoop, but if you’re working with a 40K limit, it makes a difference!)
3. Use as much vector as possible. Create all your images in flash if possible. Photographs take up too much bytes.
4. Try going grayscale with photos. Less colors= smaller file size.

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