This document presents a rule-of-thumb design procedure for wet cooling towers that can be used for power plant cycle optimization. It begins with defining the design problem and specifying inlet/outlet water temperatures and ambient wet-bulb temperature. It then provides methods to calculate the outlet air temperature, tower characteristic, loading factor, and other key parameters. These include using the average of inlet/outlet water temperatures to approximate outlet air temperature, graphically integrating the Merkel equation to determine tower characteristic, and using graphs to determine the optimum loading factor based on design conditions. The goal is to provide simplified methods for estimating cooling tower dimensions, performance, costs and other details needed for power plant analysis without requiring detailed iterative design calculations.