Creating many different complex structures from a single prepattern is achieved from either a master mold or stamping onto a solid substrate by patterning with a PDMS replica mold. Various metal patterns including ellipses, dots, rings, chains of dots (or rings), ribbons and wavy lines with various feature sizes can be generated from a single pattern of isolated ellipsoidal dots by simply varying the residual polymer film thickness and the reactive ion etching (RIE) time.