The case with which a disturbance vector can be rejected by a control system can be quantified using Disturbance Cost maps. At each frequency and for each disturbance direction, the Disturbance Cost is the amount of feedback action required in order to completely eliminate the disturbance vector. A useful property of the Disturbance Cost is its independence from specific controller tuning. As such, it is a useful tool for such applications as the investigation of control structure resilience to disturbances and for selecting from alternative control strategies. In this paper, the use of Disturbance Cost contours is illustrated for the screening of alternative feedback control structures and for the design of feedforward control systems. The method is combined with a genetic algorithm, which is used to optimize the feedforward controllers.