The shape of industrial product has to be determined within the constrained conditions of keeping firmly many kinds of functional and performance requirements. On the other hand, the configuration of artificial work would be created desirably using sense of aesthetic, even if conflicting slightly with these requirements. The development of methodology for an aesthetic design founded on human sensitivity is becoming highly desirable in recent year. However, the results of artistic design may be vague as just one of ill-defined problems in which its solution can be decided to depend upon the designer's recognition against his objects. In this paper, a method of measuring beauty quantity for artistic evaluation is proposed using aesthetic cognitive theory that formative beauty is created by associating with visual characteristics. The composed elements of external form may be transformed into various genetic codes and the optimum configuration could be found by the search using genetic algorithm. Furthermore, an expression of optimum ship appearance can be gained as drawings of profile and three dimensional computer graphics by decoding the obtained solution. From the results of this attempt, the proposed method is clarified to be useful for ship configuration design.