Docs / Authoring / Notes & asides

Notes & asides

Use callouts to highlight important information without disrupting the reading flow.

Callouts draw attention to supplementary information — a helpful aside, a potential pitfall, or a useful shortcut. They’re designed to feel like a quiet whisper in the margin, not a shouting banner across the page.

Usage

Import the Callout component and wrap your content:

example.mdx
import Callout from '@/components/mdx/Callout.astro';
<Callout type="note">
This is a note. It provides additional context.
</Callout>

Types

There are three callout types. They differ only in their label text — the visual style is deliberately identical, because the content should signal urgency, not the container.

Note

Note

Source Serif 4 is a variable font designed by Adobe specifically for screen readability. It provides the warmth of a serif typeface without sacrificing legibility at small sizes.

Tip

Keyboard shortcut

Press Cmd+K (or Ctrl+K on Windows/Linux) anywhere on the page to open the search dialog.

Warning

Warning

Changing the --content-w variable affects the entire reading experience. The default 860px was chosen to produce 75–80 characters per line, which research identifies as optimal for sustained reading.

Custom titles

Override the default label with the title prop:

<Callout type="tip" title="Performance hint">
Self-hosting fonts eliminates the network request to Google Fonts,
reducing your page load time by 100-300ms.
</Callout>
Performance hint

Self-hosting fonts eliminates the network request to Google Fonts, reducing your page load time by 100–300ms.


Design philosophy

Dustavez deliberately avoids the common pattern of colored left-border callouts (blue for info, yellow for warning, green for tip). Those color-coded borders are visual noise — they create a patchwork of competing accents on the page and train readers to skip over callouts entirely.

Instead, all callout types share the same subtle background and rounded container. The label text alone indicates the type. This keeps the page visually calm and ensures readers actually read the callout content.

Last updated: April 4, 2026
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