The wave period will strongly affect the wave load, and the prevailing method of marine structure design, as adopted nowadays, will not obtain the requisite maximum wave load on structure. This paper presents a new method to determine the design wave that is conditioned by the principle of equal return period by selecting a set of the worst wave height and period which would produce the maximum wave load as a design wave. In this way, not onlythe given design criterion keeps constant but also the design load in the worst case can be obtained.