Many Adventures
One Long Trail...
A boutique studio based in The Carolinas run by mission-driven people. We plan, design, build and support digital projects for organizations doing work worth finding. We’re also passionate about the natural world and travel near and far outdoor adventures. Check out those adventures below.
Origin Story
Period Three opened our doors in 2003 as a two-person shop taking on whatever came through the door. Twenty-three years later we are wiser; we know our capabilities, the terrain and the kinds of clients we love working with. Our work is more deliberate: strategy first, data/analytics and insights woven in. Client needs center stage. Then collaborative design that allows us to build products we can (and do) stand behind for a decade.
We stayed small on purpose. Every project gets a partner on it, start to finish. Clients get to be hands on. No handoffs to a team you never met, no layers between you and the people doing the work. When you’re navigating the digital wilderness, it’s best to have a capable guide and to travel in a group.
Why Period Three?
In 1975, two mathematicians named Tien-Yien Li and James Yorke published a short paper with a title that sounds like a threat: "Period Three Implies Chaos."
The idea goes like this. Take a simple system that updates itself over and over, the same rule applied again and again. If that system ever settles into a loop that takes exactly three steps to return to where it started, something remarkable is guaranteed. That one little three-step cycle forces the system to contain cycles of every other length too. Loops of two, of five, of a thousand. And alongside all of those, an infinite number of paths that never repeat at all, where two points that start right next to each other end up wildly far apart.
In other words: find a period of three, and you've found everything. Order and unpredictability, all living inside the same simple rule.
The paper was a landmark. It gave scientists a real mathematical definition of chaos for the first time (it was literally the first time the word "chaos" showed up in a math paper). Before Li and Yorke, people like Edward Lorenz had watched weather models behave in strange, unpredictable ways, but nobody could pin down what was going on. Li and Yorke showed that chaos isn't noise or randomness. It's a natural consequence of simple rules, and it can be understood, mapped, and worked with.
That's why we named the company after it.
Every project we take on looks simple from the outside. A website. A brand. A few pages and a contact form. But get close and the complexity is always there: the business goals, the audience, the content, the tech, the stuff nobody wrote down. Small decisions ripple outward in ways that are hard to predict. Good work in this field isn't about pretending that complexity doesn't exist. It's about recognizing the patterns inside it and building something that holds up.
Period three implies chaos. We're comfortable with that. It's where the interesting work is.
THE PARTY
Meet The Crew
The Road Not Taken
By Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
GENE CRAWFORD
GREG HILTON
THOMAS CRAWFORD
The Numbers,
The Nerdery.
a small sampling of what we've measured out there, running current from the pins on the map above.
FIELD NOTES
HOW WE WORK,
IN SIX NOTES.
Get Your Bearings
Discovery is key to unlocking incredible products and experiences. Ask the hard questions. Address the challenges head on.
Map The Terrain
Know where you’re going and how you’ll get there. Every build starts solid plan you can understand and implement.
Pack Light
Unnecessary complexity, process or tech turns too many products into crap. What ships is what you actually need. That’s our commitment.
Never Trek Alone
We KNOW that relationships matter, collaboration is key and we never leave a client hanging. We’ll be with you through the ups and downs. Just ask our clients.
Never Give Up
We’re guaranteed to face obstacles and adversity. We promise to never give up until we achieve the mission.
Leave It Better
This is our NORTH STAR. Every project, website and relationship should be better than when we found it. If we can’t do that, we won’t get involve
What’s YOUR Next Mission?
Let’s figure out the terrain, map out a course and see how we can help you launch your next big thing. No long sales cycle. NO PRESSURE.