A damage-based seismic design procedure for steel frame structures is formulated as an optimization problem, in which minimization of the initial construction cost is treated as the objective of the problem. The performance constraint of the design procedure is to achieve "repairable" damage state for earthquake demands that are less severe than the design ground motions. The Park-Ang damage index is selected as the seismic damage measure for the quantification of structural damage. The charged system search (CSS) algorithm is employed as the optimization algorithm to search the optimum solutions. To improve the time efficiency of the solution algorithm, two simplifying strategies are adopted: first, SDOF idealization of multi-story building structures capable of estimating the actual seismic response in a very short time; second, fitness approximation decreasing the number of fitness function evaluations. The results from a numerical application of the proposed framework for designing a twelve-story 3D steel frame structure demonstrate its efficiency in solving the present optimization problem.