We show that a relatively simple approach for controlling the colloidal synthesis of anisotropic CdSe semiconductor nanorods can be extended to the size-controlled preparation of magnetic Co nanorods as well as spherically shaped nanocrystals. This approach helps to define a minimum feature set needed to separately control the sizes and shapes of nanocrystals. The resulting Co nanocrystals produce interesting 2D and 3D superstructures, including ribbons of nanorods.With the growing interest in building advanced materials using nanoscale building blocks 1 , there is a significant need for general approaches to controlling the sizes and shapes of colloidal inorganic nanocrystals. A range of methods have been employed to this end, but there is still a significant need for general methods that will operate on several chemically distinct systems. Indeed, recently Belcher, Hu, and coworkers 2 have made the extremely interesting suggestion that combinatorial approaches may have the needed generality. Here we demonstrate that a unified set of relatively simple synthetic strategies can be translated from one nanocrystal system to another. We show that the principles