Manychat’s Chronically Online Magazine explores the fluid, ever-shifting nature of internet culture

Built by Manychat’s in-house creators, writers, and designers who live and breathe the same internet-native culture they’re exploring, Chronically Online is a platform made by digital creators, for digital creators. Every week, they publish a new piece, at times rooted in interviews, sometimes research-based, and at other times, reflective. “The goal isn’t to sell anything. It’s to speak directly to the people shaping culture online – their struggles, their questions, their creative lives – and to create a space where those conversations can unfold honestly,” explains Manychat’s Head of Brand Design Sergey Andronov. “Digital creators don’t just consume culture; they drive it,” adds Web Design Lead Nikita Krivonosov. “And they do it from within a space that’s often overwhelming, contradictory, and impossible to pin down.” The company behind the publication – social media marketing platform Manychat – chose to build its own digital platform to ensure that the experience of reading the magazine would reflect what it truly feels like to be online all the time; something that aligns with how this audience thinks and consumes content – fast, immersive, mobile-native, and dynamic. “That’s why the visual language embraces chaos – but not just as a style,” adds Krivonosov. “It’s a feeling.” The publication’s aesthetic hinges on a sphere metaphor, where the physical and digital worlds collide in a space of warped imagery and elastic layouts. “It’s not about distortion as damage, but about stepping into a space with a different gravity, different physics, and a different logic,” says Arthur Reimer, Brand Design Lead. We didn’t want to depict the digital world – we wanted to be inside it.” To create the effect, the team built a custom tool based on a modified shader that lets users warp images along the inner surface of a digital sphere. This became the foundation for the entire design system, he continues, “generative, responsive, and emotionally immersive. What started as a visual experiment became a language used across covers, headlines, layouts, and animations.”