Probably the most significant bottle-neck in the use of colloidal nanoparticles in real life applications is represented by their integration into functional solid-state devices. This typically required ad-hoc solutions for each colloid, including time consuming and hardly scalable steps such as ligand exchange, concentration, and self-assembly. My team recently developed an unconventional approach to force nucleation and growth of gold nanoparticles on pre-defined areas of a substrate, achieving the direct one-step growth of plasmonic arrays. We expect that this approach could be applied to a variety of different systems and materials, representing an alternative and truly scalable strategy for the preparation of complex nanoscaled architectures.