To sustain the growing demand of transparent conductive films for wide applications, such as flat panel displays, a much more cost-effective film is required over the widely used indium tin oxide film. Here we developed a promising method to manufacture a cost-effective flexible transparent conductive film of high performance by first making grid-iron patterns of thin lines on a large scale using evaporative migration characteristics of gold nanoparticles, and then by burying the grid-iron pattern into a poly(ethylene terephthalate) film.