The purpose of this paper was to investigate the effects of different types of visual illustrations on learner's learning interest, motivation and achievement, especially in multimedia learning. The participants were drawn from two classes of an "Introduction to Educational Technology" course and randomly assigned to one of the three treatments: one with cognitive interest illustrations which were designed to signal the structure of the explanation and another with emotional interest illustrations which are interesting but irrelevant illustration to understand the structure of text. The last one only contained text nformation. Result revealed that the post interest was different between learners in cognitive interest illustration group and textonly group, and also different between learners in emotional interest illustration group and text-only group. However, the types of illustration didn?t have an effect on learner's achievement in terms of information recall and achievement test. There were also no significant differences between learner's motivations among three illustration groups. The features of the type of illustration that may have contributed to the findings are discussed.