Media production includes many moments of creative work that would be best addressed as audiovisual design. The two paradigmatic understandings of design, ‘design-as-problem-solving’ (Simon, 1996), and ‘design-as-meaning-creation’ (Krippendorf, 1995), have bearing on those work-moments. The issues dealt with during those media production work-moments, as well as the problems to solve and the characteristics of the work-processes in use, resemble issues, problems and process characteristics familiar within design work (Sato & Poggenpohl, 2009).From a perspective of communication, audiovisual communication preferably is addressed as multimodal (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001) where both strata, design and production, are considered to make important impact on a message.This paper discusses the theoretical implications of considering media production as audiovisual communication during its process of being created, where design is an integrated part of that process. The benefits of considering media production as audiovisual design are proposed from a design research perspective, and are compared with other perspectives.