New media has met its match.

If you’re a Flash developer, at some point in time you’ve had to build and optimize rich media banners for your clients.

Establishing a consistent workflow and following some simple guidelines is the key to success in banner optimization. Most of these techniques are basic and common knowledge to seasoned developers, but should be a great starting point for novice to advanced programmers.

Although not meant to be a definitive list, I’ve found the following steps work well when optimizing rich media banner units:

1. Always request specs for file size before development begins:

• Banner dimensions
• File sizes
• Frame rate
• Player version

2. Polite downloads (when available): is 30-40k initial, 70-100k additional (client specs may vary)

• Base .swf should be the 30-40k max, and the additional content should load in via a second .swf

3. If you are doing simple animation, use TweenNano instead of TweenMax when programming dynamically to save a few k

4. Recreate assets in vector whenever possible, unless it is a complex vector, then it may make sense to import the asset as a bitmap

5. Combine images whenever possible

6. Remove all complex bitmap filters from bitmaps in Photoshop, and replicate them with Flash’s filters using the Properties menu (you’ll need to convert all bitmaps to MovieClips before you can apply a Flash filter)

7. Only include the text characters you are using when embedding fonts in dynamic text fields

• Occasionally it makes sense to flatten text into bitmaps (even though this is bad practice) to get the files under spec

8. Under publish settings, do the following:

• Set the target Flash player to the version spec’d out by the client
• Change bitmap compression settings as needed (individual bitmap settings may need to be enforced as necessary)
• Check Omit trace actions (occasionally knocks off a few k)
• Check Generate size report to review asset weight in your .fla and allow you to locate and resolve problem areas contributing to file size overages

Following these guidelines should keep you out of trouble. If you’ve found any other tips that have worked well for you, please let me know and I’ll update the list. Enjoy.