Managing File Size, Memory and Performance in Illustrator.

Texturing and shading with brushes, swatches and graphic styles in Adobe Illustrator can be a memory-hungry process and may result in slow computer performance.

If you are running an older machine (e.g. pre-2014) with less than 8gb of RAM you may experience slower than usual performance when attempting to use textures in Illustrator.

Our Illustrator brush sets and swatches are designed to balance high quality textures with performance however due to the fine detail in many of our assets, your system may become overloaded if you attempt to use too many brushes/swatches at once or duplicate your artwork on multiple artboards. 

Tips for avoiding system overload in Adobe Illustrator:

1. Use only a handful of brushes at a time on your artwork until you establish how many brushes your system can handle at once. This will vary depending on the detail of your artwork and how much brushwork it contains.
2. Apply your brushes on separate layers in your artwork so you can switch them off temporarily during routine saving to reduce save times.
3. Temporariliy switch off brush layers when zooming or panning with the hand tool on very large files containing large amounts of brush shading.
4. Avoid duplicating your artwork over and over or applying brushes to files containing more than 1 or 2 artboards. For example, rather than apply brushes to 3 separate illustrations saved in a single Illustrator file, save the illustrations in 3 separate illustrator files where you can work on them separately.
5. Avoid running too many applications at once. Web browsers with more than a few open tabs are a notorious memory hog especially video streaming sites. To be safe, close any/all unnecessary applications whilst working on detailed Illustrator files