Soft as silk: Single-layered (right) and lamellar-structured two-dimensional (2D) CdSe nanocrystals (left) as thin as 1.4 nm can be prepared by a soft colloidal template method. Assembly of the 2D nanocrystals can be controlled by variation of the interaction between organic layers in soft templates. The current synthetic process is relatively easy to scale up, and multigram quantities can be obtained in a single batch.