Numbers are everywhere — on doors, sidewalks, dumpsters, fire hydrants, loading docks, fuse boxes. Most people walk right past them. Your job is to find all 101, from 0 to 100, photographed in the wild. No tricks. Just you, your phone, and a city full of overlooked details.
Start your hunt →Walk anywhere. Streets, subways, markets. Numbers are hiding in plain sight once you start looking.
See a 47 on a building? A 12 on a manhole cover? Photograph it where it lives — in context, not staged.
Open the tracker, tap the number, upload your photo. Add a note and city so you remember where it was.
Fill every cell from 0 to 100. It takes weeks. Maybe months. That's exactly the point.
"The hunt was more satisfying and the reward was a new awareness of something previously invisible."
No. Numbers on trucks, menus, chalkboards, and receipts all count. If it exists in the world and you didn't put it there, it's fair game. The spirit of the hunt is noticing — not finding museum-quality signage.
No. The number has to already exist in the world. You're a hunter, not a maker. That constraint is what makes the hunt worth doing — it forces you to look at things you'd otherwise ignore.
No. Each find should be a distinct real-world spot. If a building has a 14 and a 15 on adjacent doors, those are two separate finds — but if you photograph the same wall with different framing, that's cheating.
Not at all. Most people hunt opportunistically — you're going about your day when you spot a 67 on a garbage truck. Log it. The grid fills in a completely random order and that's part of the charm.
George Nelson spent months. Most people find the first 60 or 70 quickly, then hit a wall. The elusive ones — a standalone 0, a clean 11, any number that doesn't appear on buildings — can haunt you for weeks. That's exactly the point. There's no rush.
I came across George Nelson's numbers exercise in Rob Walker's book The Art of Noticing and immediately wanted to try it. The idea is simple: find each number from 0 to 100 somewhere in the real world — not written by you, just existing there — and photograph it.
What Nelson discovered, and what the book describes, is that the hunt changes how you move through a city. You start noticing things you've been ignoring for years. The number 7 is everywhere once you're looking for it. Then you spend three weeks unable to find a 4.
This tracker is a tool for doing that hunt seriously. Log your finds, add photos, tag your city, and watch your grid fill in slowly — the way Nelson's slide carousel did, one number at a time.