Tagged: compression

How to make your Adobe Illustrator documents much smaller

If you’ve used Adobe Illustrator for any amount of time, you’ve probably created a complicated piece of artwork. Those files can be fairly large, making file transfer and storage cumbersome. Thankfully there’s a simple way to drastically reduce your file sizes.

When saving your files, choose the native AI format. This offers you the most flexibility, and the ability to reduce the files. You’ll also want to tick the Create PDF Compatible File box. This allows Illustrator to recover the file should the program crash.

Illustrator Options
In the Illustrator Options dialog box that pops up, tick the Use Compression box. That’s it! Instant smaller files.

Now you may have guessed that ticking that PDF Compatible File box also adds some overhead to the file, so if you’re looking for the smallest file size possible, go ahead and uncheck the box.

Illustrator file sizes
As you can see in the image above, the original Illustrator file weighs-in at 101.2 MB. Saving the file with PDF Compatibility and Compression reduces the file to 63.7 MB. Unchecking the PDF Compatibility box reduces the file even further to 25.4 MB in size.

That’s a big savings!

Stuffit Deluxe 2009 takes advantage of Leopard features

Years ago, back in the days before OSX, file compression on the Mac meant using applications like DiskDoubler and Aladdin Stuffit. Stuffit was a staple of every Mac computer. Many applications required the Expander app just to install, and virtually any file you downloaded off the Internet for the Mac was compressed using the Stuffit format. You could make the argument that it was the single most popular non-Apple application on the Mac for years. Aladdin (later known as Allume) sold Stuffit to Smith Micro Software in 2005, at which time it was still the dominant file compression method on the Mac OS. Flash-forward to present day and we now have file compression built-in to the OS, via BOMArchiveHelper’s .zip format. So you might be wondering why you would need anything more. Read on to find out why. (more…)