Perfectly Imperfect is the ‘social magazine’ (and nerd’s paradise) remodelling the online sphere

During the first summer of the Covid pandemic, Tyler Bainbridge co-founded Perfectly Imperfect, the ‘world’s first social magazine’ (as its tagline goes). Founded alongside Alex Cushing, the pair were set on responding to a world disconnected and fragmented by the algorithm. To fight the homogenisation of culture, the platform pumped out weekly hand-curated recs on its Substack across music, fashion, books, movies, food and more. Now, having moved out of Substack, it’s expanded into a magazine with over 500 guests profiles ranging from pop royalty Charli XCX to film legend Francis Ford Coppola, all of whom offer up their latest obsessions across all corners of culture, for you to enjoy too.

The Perfectly Imperfect social platform counterpart pi.fyi, was designed with agency Special Offer in 2023. Here, users can share their recommendations with an ever-growing online community currently, now boasting 80,000 users. Many became well acquainted with the pitfalls of online socialising during lockdown, romanticising and mourned the simpler days of MySpace and Tumblr, where you could truly make your corner of the web your own. That is until Perfectly Imperfect came along. To find out more this loved platform, It’s Nice That spoke to Tyler, associate editor Vivi Hayes, and Brent David Freaney of Special Offer.

Perfectly Imperfect began as – and still is – a nerd’s paradise. “In 2020 I was frustrated by minimalist design across the web,” Tyler shares, “which, when coupled with my mediocre design skills, led to a sort of cheeky middle finger approach of Internet Blue, big stars, a messy collage and the dreaded comic sans.” These core elements were born out of limited resources (further restricted by the pandemic) and were paired with a simple selfie for guest images. It makes for a truly horizontal methodology of connection when you have figures like John Cale of Velvet Underground sending in a selfie: “It really levels the playing field,” says Tyler. 2025 marked Perfectly Imperfect’s redesign, which built upon its recognisable graphic style. The site now hosts a design system of stretched typography, darker blue and more subtle stars, whilst still staying true to its maximalist heart.

Associate editor Vivi Hayes runs the day-to-day design for these guest graphics, alongside running the recent Browser History and Vibes Bulletin columns on the site. Vivi shares: “I’ve been super online my entire life, from early forums and blogs to social media. I owe my taste to the amazing people who share what they’re into online.” But Vivi is fatigued by the noise of apps like Twitter (we’re still calling it Twitter) and Instagram. Perfectly Imperfect’s focus on taste and recommendations boils connection down to shared interests – the building blocks of subculture that have crumbled in the face of fleeting micro trends. She continues, “Pi.fyi constantly reminds me of the best parts of being online, and I know I’m not alone in this sentiment. It leaves the rabble behind.”

When navigating to the Perfectly Imperfect site, you’re prompted to create a Pi.fyi account, an antidote to the fatigue of eye-glazed doomscrolling. Doomscrolling refers to the virtually endless pit of habitual scrolling; a term named word of the year by Oxford Dictionary which creeped into public lexicon as Covid hit. It’s no surprise that, in 2025, brain rot was added to the Oxford Dictionary following a public vote.

Talking about the design for Perfectly Imperfect’s social site pi.fyi, on the other hand, Tyler says: “The design calls back to an era where algorithms didn’t dominate your day-to-day experience on the internet.” Tyler rejects the homogenisation of web design and decided to swerve Perfectly Imperfect into a lane of its own, inspired by the early internet aesthetics of “solid but saturated colours, lack of texture, MS Paint-style airbrushing, and a singular broadcast-style aesthetic”, Brent David Freaney tells us. Brent’s studio Special Offer collaborated with Tyler to bring the best parts of early internet’s visuality, whilst still creating something that belongs in 2025. Some fun facts: Pi.fyi’s colour system was modelled from 1990s McDonald’s brand and style guidelines, and the spray paint logo was inspired by an old Teenage Fanclub band t-shirt Tyler got on eBay.

The platform thrives in the chaos, all born from its visible human touch. “A lot of the core pages that users spend time on (the home page, profiles, etc) are designed to look more like a magazine than a social site.” The visuals are deliberately flat, featuring few animations, in order to let the design cut through. The mixture of a home page presented as acting front page, with editorial content, user posts, profiles adorned in large image paired with bold bordered text, and written content pouring from the right side of the screen. Tyler says: “It’s this approach that’s led us to calling Perfectly Imperfect a ‘social magazine’.” Tyler is inspired by the likes of Index Mag, MySpace, and i-D, among others – all boundary-pushing platforms which hold a cultural authority.

From the social side, you can easily navigate back to editorial index. Both editorial and social are inextricably linked together, making both the user’s and guests’ tastes as important as each-other, and curation is a shared entity. Speaking on the curatorial aspect of Perfectly Imperfect, Tyler says: “We try to feature people who define culture in some way, whether it’s top-down from the biggest celebrities in the world, or bottom up from underground musicians, artists, and filmmakers.” With every evolution, Perfectly Imperfect are reshaping the social experience, without hierarchy, without noise, and most importantly, without succumbing to the dreaded social algorithm we’ve been forced to endure.