New York City, summer of 2010, the year after the famous economic crash. I was fresh out of college and was looking to land a job as a digital designer.

I convinced my creative partner at the time (and bestest friend!), Carlos, to venture out in the middle of the night posting thousands of yellow xeroxed papers of a rubber duck that I had picked up from the dollar store, also known as the art kid’s most resourceful material library. Along with the words “LOST DUCK” in bolded type. No number to call.

As we intended for it to be revealed in the mail of all of my aspiring company’s recruiters and creative directors to look at our online portfolio.

We then went ahead and mailed in the rubber duck with the url of our website sharpied at the bottom, with a message that said. “You might be wondering about the lost duck, here it is.”

The LOST DUCK Project genuinely shows the essence of a young creative eager to create and take on challenges...and maybe a not so good way to make friends with graffiti artists while you are caught in the middle of the night glueing yellow stuff over their art!

Below are some of the tweets, graffiti interpretations, and media attention that buzzed over that summer. Among which a couple of write-ups in the Village Voice. Weeks passed since our first batch of homemade flour glue and late nights xerox sessions at the 24 hrs Staple store, people still wondering the motive behind this act. It was late one night where we were stopped by a reporter in disguise, we told the truth, and the mystery was revealed in the papers the next morning.

The LOST DUCK project turned out to be a great success as a way to catch the advertising world’s attention, and as a chance to create something for the community. Seeing people’s responses made us realize how we had managed to grab their interest without being invasive. What began as an offline project quickly took an online life of its own. We were excited and happy by the responses we elicited from people, both from the street and in agencies.

We want to continue doing things that make people interact with one another, and hopefully change the way people live their lives. Everyone who tweeted and blogged about it helped make it what it is now. We feel we no longer own this project, it is a part of the community and remains in New York as a piece of street art. Our wheat paste turned out to be super strong, and there are some posters that are still up, a reminder of what we did and what we can do.