Electrodeposition from a binary electrolyte produces irregular deposits with various shapes. The understanding of this phenomenon has attracted much interest in the last 50 years. At the beginning of the 90s, Chazalviel proposed a model showing that, in such systems, the combined motion of anions and cations induces the creation of a non-classical space charge region near the cathode. This was shown to provide a direct explanation for the ramified growth and a detailed description of the initial growth stages. We present in this paper some of the recent progress in this domain. We also present several applications which have been reported in the recent literature, including nanowires, thin metal films, films with periodic nanostructure: although industrial production of these objects is not yet available, interesting perspectives have been opened by these studies. (C) 2007 Published by Elsevier Ltd.