The album's artwork featured painted ink drawings by fashion illustratorTony Viramontes[2] of fashion model Violeta Sanchez as well as an innovative "light space" photograph of the band by Dean Chamberlain, who also directed the video for the song "Missing".[3]Nick Rhodes said of the model Sanchez on the album cover, "She had an elegance to her, an old style classic beauty."[2]
As part of EMI's massive Duran Duran reissue plans, a jewel case 3 disc (2CD, 1 DVD) box set of So Red the Rose was released on 12 April 2010. It included the entire album, single mixes, the B-sides "She's Moody and Grey, She's Mean and She's Restless" and "Flame Game" (Yo Homeboy mix), four versions of non-album track "Say the Word" (a track from the soundtrack of Playing for Keeps), and an instrumental mix of "The Promise". The DVD contains the original 1987 video release Arcadia.
In 2008 a previously available, more complete limited edition for Japan fan club (23-track digitally) was remastered into 6 CD single set, comprising all the singles ever released for the So Red the Rose LP, including "Say the Word". The packaging is a 'so red the velvet', faithfully replicating the original single sleeve artwork, plus 8-page fold-out picture booklet of lyrics and biography.
Some versions of the album and related singles contained a numeric code in their artwork, this code allocated even numbers to letters, beginning with 16=A, and continuing to 52=S, and then wrapping around to 02=T up to 14=Z. 00 represents either a space or a mid-word capitalization (being used before the "B" in Le Bon). The numbers on the front cover of the US CD release decode to spell TAYLOR RHODES LE BON (the surnames of the three members of the group). The circular image on the back of the CD insert spells SO RED THE ROSE both forward and backward, while the three letters in the center are T R L (Taylor/Rhodes/Le Bon)
^ abcRhys-Morgan, Dean. Bold, Beautiful and Damned: The World of 1980's Fashion Illustrator Tony Viramontes, London: Lawrence King Publishing Ltd., 2013 ISBN978-1-78067-3073, p.34