The main objective of the present paper is to address a formal procedure for orthotropic steel plates design. The theme of the proposed approach is to recast the design procedure into a mathematical programming model. The objective function to be optimized is the total weight of the structure. The total weight is function of its layout parameters and structural element design variables. Mean while the proposed approach takes into consideration the strength and rigidity criteria in addition to other dimensional constraints. A nonlinear programming model is developed which consists of a nonlinear objective function and a set of implicit/explicit nonlinear constraints. A transformation method is adopted for minimization strategy, where the primal model constrained problem is transformed into a sequence of unconstrained minimization models. The search strategy is based on the well-known Fletcher/Powell algorithm. The finite element technique is adopted for discretization and analysis strategies. Mindlin theory is selected to simulate the finite element model and a selective reduced integration scheme is exploited to avoid a shear lock problem.