Over the past decades, fibre-reinforced composite structures have been increasingly adopted into mainstream manufacturing over conventional metals owing to their higher performance attributes, such as superior strength-to-weight ratios. Composite structures offer the unique advantage of tailoring reinforcements in correspondence with design load cases. This allows for more efficient and better performing structures. Traditionally for composite laminate structures, the design space and freedom were vastly influenced by the accumulated experience in design and certification, as well as available flexibility in manufacturing processes; the available degree of freedom in aligning fibres dictated the design freedom available. With the advent of advanced processes such as automated fibre placement (AFP), reinforced tows can now be placed with more freedom and accuracy; even allowing for tows to be steered during deposition. These are called variable stiffness composite laminates. Fibre directionality within these laminates can be tailored to achieve an optimal load redistribution, thereby increasing its structural performance. Novel additive manufacturing such as Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) allow for more complex geometries to be manufacturable in a variety of materials. Such a process can allow more design space and freedom in existing optimization frameworks for designing variable stiffness laminates. Many reinforced thermoplastic materials can be processed using FDM. Short fibre reinforced materials are very readily available and can be used on all commercially available FDM platforms with minimal changes. This research culminates the three key aspects in engineering – design, material, and process. First, a suitable design framework is chosen, which in combination with added the design freedom by virtue of a novel process such as FDM, is used to design laminates optimized for buckling performance. Additional design freedom is afforded to the optimization framework by means of relaxing the manufacturability constraint – which restricts the maximum allowable curvature of each individual path within the laminate. Secondly, these laminates are manufactured using short fibre reinforced thermoplastic material, for which the shear-induced alignment of the material is analyzed to predict the effective mechanical properties under the parameters used for printing the laminates. Lastly, to validate the effect of additional design space on the effective performance of these laminates, a suitable experimental protocol is devised and used. For the optimized laminates, two cases for maximum allowable steering curvature are considered – one low and one high, and an effective quasi-isotropic laminate is used as a benchmark for comparison. Finally, all the laminates are tested under compression and analyzed. The increase in buckling performance of optimized laminates corresponding to increase in allowable steering is verified, as well as insights are drawn from the processing and experimentation to suggest future recommendations.