This book deals with the first phases of ship design, which are also known asBasic design Basic Design, but often merged into the more general definition of Preliminary DesignPreliminary design. A ship is designed to serve specific requirements of his owner or a mission of an authority or society, disposing certain functional characteristics, specific hull formHull form and powering, space and weightWeight distribution, while demonstrating certain technical and economic performance. The introductory this chapter of this book deals with basic definitions and characteristics of conventional ship and Advanced Marine Vehicles (AMVs)Advanced Marine Vehicles (AMVs); compares the transport efficiencyTransport efficiency and environmental impact of conventional ships and AMVs with the performance of representatives of land and air transport; provides a brief introduction to the maritime transport and its relationship to innovative design concepts, to the energy efficiency and the environmental impact; introduces the main approaches to and the main phases of ship design; defines the objectives of preliminary ship design; comments on the main steps of the design procedure and their illustration by the design spiralDesign spiral and by modern design synthesisDesign synthesis approaches; proceeds with a categorization of common ship types into main ship categories, enabling uniform approaches to their design; elaborates on alternative methods for determining ship’s main dimensions and of other basic characteristics after introducing the main ship types.