The increasing complexity of modern functional materials leads to the demand of a cost efficient tool for the development of new products. One possible approach to this question is the adaptation of combinatorial methods to the specific requirements of materials industry. These methods, originally developed for the pharmaceutical industry, have recently been applied to the screening of superconductive, magnetoresistant and photoluminescent materials. The principle of these combinatorial approaches is the deposition of large materials libraries in one process combined with fast methods for the determination of the resulting properties. In this paper, the deposition and characterization of laterally graded materials libraries (composition spread) is presented. The films have been deposited by reactive magnetron sputtering, using two or three metallic targets at a low angle to the substrate surface as well as a system of apertures. To illustrate the advantages of combinatorial approaches for the development The increasing complexity of modern functional materials leads to the demand of a cost efficient tool for the development of new products. One possible approach to this question is the adaptation of combinatorial methods to the specific requirements of materials industry. These methods, initially developed for the pharmaceutical industry, have recently been applied to the screening of superconductive, magnetoresistant and photoluminescent materials. The principle of these combinatorial approaches is the deposition of large materials libraries in one process combined with fast methods for the determination of the resulting properties. The deposition and characterization of laterally graded materials libraries (composition spread) is presented. The films have been deposited by reactive magnetron sputtering, using two or three metallic targets at a low angle to the substrate surface as well as a system of apertures. the advantages of combinatorial approaches for the development