Advanced structural materials have received extensive attention in the field of materials and structural design in recent years. These materials generally achieve excellent performances via structural design at multiple length-scales. In the early material design, some researchers created reasonable mathematical and mechanical models from the natural topologies; some researchers established bionic mechanical models based on the structural and functional characteristics of biological systems. Nevertheless, it isn't easy to obtain the optimal designs only based on ingenious design. To traverse the design space to search for the optimal design by trial and error is also not practical. Data-driven methods can establish complex relationships of multi-dimensional variables, and they can reveal mechanical mechanisms and laws that are difficult to be discovered by traditional methods. Hence, this talk reviews the development of advanced structural material design methods. Various mainstream design methods are compared and illustrated. The status of intelligent design of advanced structural materials based on data-driven methods is introduced. The prospect of this research area is discussed.