In this paper, a new method to design sliding surfaces using eigenstructure assignment is proposed. Most conventional methods for constructing the surfaces require special form like canonical or regular canonical form of system matrices. But the proposed method can be applied to arbitrary system matrices. Futhermore, the surface matrix, C can be decided for the matrix multiplication, CB to have a designated form. SVD is used to decide desirable eigenvectors explicitly. To verify the proposed algorithm, a sliding mode controller for a multivariable system with matched uncertainty is constructed. The controller is designed to guarantee minimum approach velocity to the sliding surface.