A new technique has been developed for the design of die shapes in the plane strain forging process. The objective of this research work is to develop a design procedure to obtain the number of stages and the shape of each die for manufacturing a desired product. Metal flow during the forging is considered in the design of the intermediate die shapes in multistage forgings. The two approaches developed for the preform shapes design are conformal mapping techniques and ideal material flow simulations. The forging process is simulated using a nonlinear rigid visco plastic finite element program ALPID (analysis of large plastic incremental deformation). Staging criteria is developed from the results of the forging simulation and the number of stages are based on the stress ratio parameter g (mean stress/effective stress) and strain rate gradient information. This paper presents two examples of forgings to demonstrate an optimal die shape design methodology.