A design procedure for a microwave absorber is presented. The absorber consists of two lossy planar layers on a conducting plate. One of the layers is magnetically lossy while the other is electrically lossy. With a prescribed percentage of power loss in each layer and a partial knowledge of the layer parameters, a complete design procedure is outlined. It is shown that the bandwidth over which the reflection loss is above a certain limit depends on the ratio of power loss in the two layers. It is shown that high reflection loss can be achieved over frequency ranges as high as 3:1 ratio.