I’ve created about a bajillion Flash Banner ads, and I don’t think a single one of them met the file size requirements straight away. 35k for what’s essentially a 15 second video? That can be a tall order if you’re not planning properly. Here’s a few things to think about when concepting and designing your next ad.

1. Dimensions of photos: File size increases exponentially with the size of the photos used. You can include a lot of little photos (as long as there is not a lot of transparency happening), and it won’t make nearly as big a difference as one large one. You can pretty much count on one full screen photo on a 160x600 ad (at good quality) eating up the majority of your allotted file size. If you know you’ve got to use a lot of photos and the file size will be tight, try making the photos as small as possible in dimension - it makes a big difference.

2. Number of photos used: Especially if we are featuring cocktails, where there are lots of colors and everything needs to look crisp, you should really keep this down to a minimum - drink, garnish, bottle, and maybe one extra photo or complex background element.

3. Image Quality: If you have to use a lot of photos, keep in mind each image can be set to a custom quality in flash. So while bottle shots should probably be high quality, things that move fast and aren’t on screen for a long time can be reduced in quality without the viewer noticing as much.

4. Number of Colors Used: This actually seems to be a very big contributor to large file size. It doesn’t matter if all your images but one are black and white, if one of them uses every color of the rainbow, your file size will increase.

5. Complexity of transparency: The more complex the transparency, the larger the file size. If you have an object that’s more or less square, the transparency isn’t going to increase the file size much. But if you have some complex, cloud like gradient that dies off really gradually, it’s going to increase the file size significantly.

6. Vectors: The file size difference from vector to raster is huge. You could put in about twenty simple vectors for one photo. However, if a vector is very complex and has a lot of gradients, and is fairly small, you might be better off using a photo. In general, if you could make it yourself in illustrator in a few minutes, you should do it in vector. This also allows us much more flexibility in terms of animating separate elements within the vector, rather than just animating a whole photo itself.

7. Vector Smart Objects: Photoshop allows you to retain vector objects as smart objects, meaning that if you import something from, say, illustrator or acrobat, photoshop does not rasterize it, and allows you to continually edit the original vector, even after applying photoshop layer effects. As much as possible, you should try to keep vectors as smart objects. Otherwise, we generally have to recreate them in flash, and we don’t do as good a job as the designers do in our recreations.

8. Repetition: Reusing elements in flash does not increase file size. If you have some background design element in a banner, and it shows up 5 different times (or at 5 different places on the screen at once), whether it’s flipped, distorted, color-adjusted, etc., your file size will be the same as if you just had one. So if you think a design is going to be tight on file size, try reusing graphics instead of creating a bunch of graphics that are fairly similar.

Keep these things in mind and you’ll have an ad that doesn’t compromise on concept or quality.