Metallic sandwich plates with inner dimpled shell subject to 3-point bending have been analyzed and then optimized for minimum weight. Inner dimpled shells can be easily fabricated by press or roll with high precision and bonded with same material skin sheets by resistance welding or adhesive bonding. Metallic sandwich plates with inner dimpled shell structure can be optimally designed for minimum weight subject to prescribed combination of bending and transverse shear loads. Fundamental findings for lightweight design are presented through constrained optimization. Failure responses of sandwich plates are predicted and formulated with an assumption of narrow sandwich beam theory. Failure is attributed to four kinds of mechanisms: face yielding, face buckling, dimple buckling and dimple collapse. Optimized shape of inner dimpled shell structure is a hemispherical shell to minimize weight without failure. It is demonstrated that bending stiffness of sandwich plate is 2 or 3 times larger than solid plates with the same strength. Failure mode boundaries and iso-strength lines dependent upon the geometry and yield strain of the material are plotted with respect to geometric parameters on the failure map. Because optimal parameters of maximum strength for given material weight can be selected from the map, analytic solutions for maximum strength are expressed as a function of only material property and proposed strength. These optimal parameters match well with numerical optimal parameters.