As the demand for the design of modular manipulators or special purpose manipulators has increased, task based design to design an optimal manipulator for a given task become more and more important. However, the complexity with a large number of design parameters, and highly nonlinear and implicit functions are characteristics of a general manipulator design. To achieve the goal of task based design, it is necessary to develop a methodology to solve the complexity. This paper addresses how to determine the kinematic parameters of a two-degrees of freedom manipulator with parallelogram five-bar link mechanism from a given task, namely, how to map a given task into the kinematic parameters. With simplified example of designing a manipulator with five-bar link mechanism, the methodology for task based design is presented. And it introduces formulations of a given task and manipulator specifications, and presents a new dexterity measure for manipulator design. Also the optimization problem with constraints is solved by using a genetic algorithm that provides robust search in complex spaces.