Recently, fractional order systems (FOS) have attracted more and more attention in various fields. But the control design techniques available for the FOS suffer from the lack of direct systematic approaches. In this paper, we focus on a given type of simple model of FOS. A fractional order [proportional derivative] (FO-[PD]) controller is proposed for this class of FOS, and a practical and systematic tuning procedure has been developed for the proposed FO-[PD] controller synthesis. The fairness issue in comparing with other controllers such as the traditional integer order PID (IO-PID) controller and the fractional order proportional derivative (FO-PD) controller has been addressed under the same number of design parameters and the same specifications. Fair comparisons of the three controllers (i.e., IO-PID, FO-PD and FO-[PD]) via the simulation tests illustrate that, the IO-PID controller designed may not always be stabilizing to achieve flat-phase specification while both FO-PD and FO-[PD] controllers designed are always stabilizing. Furthermore, the proposed FO-[PD] controller outperforms FO-PD controller for the class of fractional order systems. Crown Copyright (C) 2009 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.