[Pydotorg-redesign] Draft HTML for redesign proposal

[Tim Parkin]

Hi all,

After a *huge* discussion about contrasts and fonts, we've come to some
conclusions and some queries.

Contrast wise the voting has been 50/50 between people liking 80% and
100%. A surprising number of people responded with different contrasts
depending on the font. A sample demographic split

1) designers preferred 80% 
2) oldies slightly preferred 100%
3) youngsters preferred 80%
4) the balance was split between people professing difficulty/tiredness
reading 80% and 100%

Overall I think providing an 80% (or maybe 85% as this seemed to be a
demarcation point for some people) and allowing people to choose an
unstyled version would be appropriate at this point. This decision is by
no means set in stone as it would be trivial to change at any point in
the future.

As for fonts, although a lot of people liked verdana, almost as many
preferred arial. We extended slightly to include various other common
fonts as follows

Tahoma
Trebuchet MS
Lucida Sans
Bitstream Vera Sans
Helvetica
MS Sans Serif

Tahoma, Trebuchet, MS Sans Serif and Helvetica were awful. This left
Lucida Sans and Bitstream Vera Sans. Out of these Bitstream Vera Sans
won hands down. We had a surprising discovery. On closer inspection we
discovered that Bitstream Vera Sana was antialiasing at smaller sizes
(which no other windows fonts we looked at did). This in combination
with the quality of the font (and it's license) means we would recommend
using the following order of fonts for the website

"Bitstream Vera Sans", Verdana, "Lucida Sans", Geneva, Helvetica,
sans-serif

And I'd even go further to suggest that users of the Python site
download the bitstream vera font if they want to get high quality body
text.

A sample of the results are here :-

http://pollenation.net/assets/public/fonts/bitstream-vera-sans.png
http://pollenation.net/assets/public/fonts/verdana.png
http://pollenation.net/assets/public/fonts/lucida.png
http://pollenation.net/assets/public/fonts/arial.png

Cheers 

Tim