C H A P T E R  19

Callouts and Quotes

This chapter discusses design patterns that create callouts and quotes.

A callout is a key point pulled out of the document to grab a reader’s attention so he or she will read the document and remember the point after having read it. A callout is repeated twice in a document: once as part of the body of the document and once again for display as a callout. A callout is displayed prominently so the reader cannot miss it. Because a callout is extracted from a document’s text, it is often an inline element, although it could be a block element.

I have grouped callouts and quotes together because they are closely related. Callouts are also known as pull quotes because they are quotes pulled from the document. There are differences between pull quotes and quotes. A pull quote (or callout) requires the same text to be repeated twice within a document, whereas a quote occurs only once. Also, a quote typically includes a citation, whereas a pull quote does not. Lastly, quotes belong visually and semantically as part of the content, whereas callouts are visually and semantically set apart from the content and are often moved to the left or right sides or margins of a document. In the rest of this chapter, I will refer to pull quotes as callouts to avoid confusing them with regular quotes.