@mdboom - I'm unable to build the docs at the moment (none of the examples generate images, just a link to the source). I've eyeballed this and am comfortable with the changes, but I wanted to have a look at the built output. Are you free to have a look yourself?

This looks cool to me, too. I've put the results up here: http://matplotlib.org/dev/

Might need to wait a few minutes as there is some lag when updating github pages.

Thanks @mdboom. @tonysyu - do you mind rebasing and we are good to go. 👍

@tonysyu: don't sweat the rebase -- I'll just manually merge this as part of a number of other doc fixes I'm doing right now. Stay tuned.

Closing in favor of #2041, which includes @tonysyu's commits rebased on current master.