Hi HN. I'm Matt, the co-founder of Red Pen. I'm a designer who turned developer because I wanted to make Red Pen.

This is our big v2. Cool things you could try: the front page has an onboarding bot that simulates using the product; commenting on designs use Pusher and stream live; and I like to think I made it pretty damn fast.

Appreciate the feedback! (eh eh)

Really great design and execution. Are you responsible for the animations (on the marketing site and product itself) and other components? If so, what was your learning process (a book, website, etc.)?

My co-founder @8apixel and I co-designed it (we make competing designs then choose/merge the best ideas.) We both shared in coding the front-end.

Coding front-end and animations is just searching google for examples + practice. I didn't find a shortcut, sadly! I fiddle with CSS animations until they match what I imagine them to be. Ceasar (http://matthewlein.com/ceaser/) is really good for getting kinetics right.

It's also a huge help when designers better than you give you feedback and suggestions; because they can picture a different finished product to you. During Red Pen's development I would share Red Pen with other designers who would give me feedback about Red Pen on Red Pen (whoa).

Back-end learning was harder because I came in (a year ago) with little Ruby or Rails knowledge. Why the Lucky Stiff's ebook on Ruby was inspirational (and it had cartoons cats!!). Rails for Zombies was a nice primer to Rails. The rest was Google. Knowing devs was a bonus because I could hire them to cover my arse (security audits and performance optimisation.)

I'm mostly a programmer.

I used to do a similar thing on Basecamp. Annotate the picture with OS X's Preview.app and then drag and drop to upload it.

Collect the textual feedback and then upload a new work again. Repeat that for like 10 iterations.

Also, I upload the works for remote peer reviews. Not real-time client reviews.

In those cases, there isn't a strong advantage in using Red Pen.

Just share my thoughts.

    Pricing
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labels have poor contrast

What's your main differentiator from an app like say, InvisionApp?

Invision and similar apps like it, technically, do everything Red Pen does. But in doing everything, they become overwhelming to use. The clients I worked with on freelance struggled to understand Invision: the signup was lengthy and distracting, the mode switching confused them, they lost their place in the hierarchy— it required me to prod them to use it, and it produced shallow feedback. Conversely, I have a folder of Red Pen customer emails who report their clients produce significantly greater feedback.

This word's meaning has been hugely diluted but "experience" matters. If you're trying to communicate something, you want your message to come across as you intend. If you want someone to be honest with you, you want them to feel at ease. That's the difference. It's easy to give feedback on Red Pen.

Got it - so the Basecamp strategy of "We’d rather our customers grow out of our products eventually than never be able to grow into them in the first place." - http://signalvnoise.com/archives2/growing_in_vs_growing_out....

That's an excellent way to put it.

This looks really really good! I don't see a use for it right now so I'm going to wait until I start a new collaborative project so as not to waste the 30 days evaluation.

But one thing is I might forget about it when I'll need it. Just a wish but you should do some sort of 5 free projects for students like github does.

Email [email protected] and I will personally remind you in two weeks :D

Education discounts is something we've thought about. You've up-voted that thought for us.

Unrelated to my other positive comments...

I think the "show hidden comments" needs a bit of tweaking. I came across a case where it didn't really need expanding. Bit of a pet peeve of mine.

See screenshots below. Firefox 28.0, OS X 10.9.2

http://imgur.com/qE8StaH

http://imgur.com/ALGsofX

But it saved you 10px of precious reading space!

But, yes, valid feedback. It should be smarter.

I started using Red Pen when I was working with Katie (who is a rocking designer) at one of my previous jobs. I've then taken Red Pen and used it at a bunch of other places now.

I've always ended up with bunches of printed mockups with annotations on them which are hard to version and end up piling up on my desk. Red Pen means that I can work with anyone to get a design just right.

I really like the improvements. V1 was very useable, and really the only thing lacking was a "professional" introduction page. And you even added versioning, too!

Also, congratulations on finding a business model! I like how you're charging for active projects, and allow past ones to be archived and revived. Strikes me as pretty ethical.

Yeah, we designed the pricing model based on what we would actually use as designers. I've always been able to spot arbitrary obstructions products throw up on purpose— and it never felt right.

This tool, quite seriously, has changed our business. V2 is off the hizzle.

Any difference between you and Viewflux (http://www.viewflux.com)? - been using it for a while.

Woah! This looks really really nice. I'm definitely going to re-visit it when I get back working on my start-up :D