This paper develops a design procedure for simultaneous coordinated designing of the static synchronous compensator controller parameters (STATCOM) and power system stabilizer (PSS) in multimachine power system. The artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is employed to search for optimal controllers parameters. ABC algorithm is a collective intelligence based on optimization algorithm inspired by the feeding behavior of bees in finding food. Rapid convergence and high precision are the capabilities of this algorithm which in this study to demonstrate its effectiveness and robustness, a two zone - four machines system is used and analyzed through non-linear simulation of time-domain and the results are compared with particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. The optimization after a large turbulence shows that the coordinated design of the STATCOM and PSS controllers' parameters using the ABC algorithm considerably improves the system stability together with rapid damping of the system fluctuations as compared to the state without optimization. On the other hand, the optimization results using the ABC algorithm shows the superiority of this method over the PSO algorithm.