The use of visual display to improve students’ learning has been increasingly developed. Reviews of the effects of pictures supported the assertion that carefully constructed text illustrations generally enhanced learners’ performance on a variety of text dependent cognitive outcomes. This assertion is more significant in special education. Recent research has extended picture in text conclusion to alternative media and technological formats and has begun more systematically to explore the ‘whys’, ‘whens’ and for ‘whoms’ of picture facilitation and challenges faced with multimodal representation. Consideration is given here to conventional types of textbook illustration, image functions and theories of cognitive processing with several tenets for teachers.