scopic film. We have seen that the KMC model is able to describe the interplay of solute diffusion within the solvent and solvent evaporation/condensation. It also takes the liquid-liquid, liquid- particle and particle-particle interactions into account and therefore allows us to distinguish differ- ent regimes of the transverse (fingering) instability of the evaporative dewetting front: a transport regime where the instability is almost completely independent of the interaction strengths and a demixing regime where particles and liquid demix at the receding front thereby increasing its transverse instability. The dynamical density functional theory describes the coupled dynamics of the density fields of the liquid and the nanoparticles. In the form described above (i.e. based on the two-dimensional hamiltonian (3)) we obtain a simple theory that allows us to study the time evolution of the evapo- rating ultrathin film and also to investigate the influence of processes such as surface diffusion by the liquid, which are not incorporated in the KMC model. However, it is straightforward to extend the theory to consider a fully three-dimensional fluid film, in which one can distinguish between short- and long-range interactions of solvent and/or solute with the substrate. We have, however, restricted the examples given here to situations that can also be described using the KMC model. A further exploration will be presented elsewhere. Finally, we have discussed a simple thin film model for the hydrodynamics on the mesoscale. It results from a long-wave approximation and consists of coupled evolution equations for the film thickness profile and the mean particle concentration. It has been used to discuss the self-pinning of receding contact lines that is related to the formation of rings of dried-in particles (coffee- stain effect) that frequently occurs when films or drops of solutions or suspensions dewet by the combined effects of convection and evaporation. One of the primary goals of researchers in this field, is the search for simple-to-use techniques that allow one to produce hierarchically structured functional layers for a wide range of applica- tions such as, e.g., organic solar cells [98]. This means that the experiments advance very rapidly towards increasingly complex systems. For example, there have been investigations of the influ- ence of the phase behaviour on the drying of droplets of a suspension of hard-sphere colloidal particles and non-adsorbing polymer [99], of the instabilities and the formation of drops in evap- orating thin films of binary solutions [100] that may lead to treelike patterns [101], of effects of a secondary phase separation on evaporation-induced pattern formation in polymer films [102], and of the influence of an imposed flow on decomposition and deposition processes in a sliding ridge of evaporating solution of a binary polymer mixture [103] and of the influence of rather 24