Dramatically Reduce EPS File Size

We all learn things that make us wonder what took us so long to figure them out, and for many of you, this will be one of those times.

Have you ever been working on an Illustrator file but when you save it as an EPS the file size seems to balloon exponentially for no reason? The trick is that there is a reason, you just don't know it yet.

For our example, we are using our Hand Drawn Design Elements Vector Pack 1 (blatant product placement), but it works for absolutely any EPS file that contains vector art.

If you are the proud owner of our pack, you will notice that the EPS version of the file is 2.56MB in size. Not terrible, but we can do better.

The artboard in this file is 12 square inches. If we open the file and resize the contents of the artboard to about 34 square inches and resave the file, is is now 5.87MB.

Alternatively, if we resize the contents of the artboard to approximately 4 square inches and resave the file, it is now 1.04MB. That is a reduction of almost 60% in less than 10 seconds.

This may not seem like a big deal, and it really isn't for a file this size, but imagine you have 100 files that are 100MB each taking up a total of 10GB of your hard drive space. By using this simple technique, you can save yourself nearly 60GB.