Pull up a chair, youngsters, and let me tell you about when I started making flash banner ads… back when there was a 30 kilobyte limit! Yes, you heard me right, you had to fit every bit of banner juice you had into the wee thimble of 30 kilobytes. It eventually crawled up to a fat 40 kilobytes, causing much celebration and unrealistic hailing of a new day… and there it remained for over a decade.

In these days of supercomputers in your pocket and cars that drive themselves (drive THEMSELVES! Where do you suppose they go?), HTML5 banner ads have largely replaced flash ones, and necessitated vendors re-examining file size… they seem to be settling around 150k-200K for them. Which is great… but…

40 kilobytes was not a lot to work with. But working within limitations can be fun. Here are some examples where I felt I won the 40k challenge in a big way, stuffing these suckers’ little kilobytes to bursting like a goddamn Thanksgiving turkey.

Flash is going the way of the dinosaur in a little while here, so I’ve converted them to video… and now they are no longer clocking in at those teeny little file sizes. They don’t look as good as they used to, either, lacking Flash’s vector crispness. Progress!

I assure you, this stuff was pretty impressive back in the day. I guess you had to be there.

Target Weekly Ad
Target Quaker Oats Star Search
Target Purina Friskies
Target Purina Friskies 2
Target Turbo
Target Videogames
Target Pantene
Phillips UV Vodka Banner
Northwestern Mutual Golf Banner