I paid someone to design some graphic, and after he’s done, I received a jpg file that’s 727KB. Then, upon some messages back and forth, he finally sent me the AI file that’s 867KB. Since I am not a tech savvy kind of person, and a little bit of common sense is all I have. For that, I have a hunch that guy is play games with me, for I understand AI file is much bigger in size than jpg file, or am I mistaking ? Can anybody shed some light on this, whether or not I am getting the AI (Adobe Illustrator) file ? Thanks. It’s now 11:10 Sunday (Apr26) night here in California
Without examining both the .jpeg and the .ai file, there’s no way to tell. However, there’s nothing unusual or suspicious about the relative files sizes you mentioned.
To Just-B, so you are saying, that I need to open up the file, then magnify it to double or triple the original size, to see if the graphic gets any grainy, rather than simply judge on the size of KB… Please confirm, thank you. 12:03 Sunday mid-nigher here in California
It has nothing to do with magnifying the image to see if it gets grainy, pixelated or whatever. There are dozens of variables that affect file size from resolution of the .jpeg, to the amount of detail in the vector file, to the degree of compression in the .jpeg, to how efficiently the image will compress to a half dozen other things.
What I’m saying for sure is that all those variable add up to a situation where there’s nothing about the relative file sizes that makes me suspicious. Maybe you have other reasons to be suspicious of what you’ve been given, but the file sizes shouldn’t be one of them — there’s nothing out of the ordinary there.
As B said, the file size is not any kind of indicator. I could give you a 3gig photoshop file from an 867kb Illustrator file and it could either be spectacular or garbage, depending on how the Illustrator file was built.
Why would you think magnifying the image 2x or 3x would give any indication of suitability? A file is usually built with the end purpose in mind. If your end purpose is a jpg for the web, then enlarging it will of course show pixellation. If your Illustrator file has placed or embedded images or any raster effects applied, those may pixellate on enlarging as well but would be perfectly fine at the size you intend to use the image.
Sounds like you have trust issues.