The self-billed "original buyer's guide for men" founded in 2002 by Marc Ecko, Complex introduced a redesign in its April/May issue to coincide with its fourth anniversary. It was propitious timing for the bimonthly to strut a new look, given the late-March demise of Cargo, its main competitor. While Cargo failed to define its demographics clearly enough—Gay or straight? Upscale or mid-market?—Complex had always spoken consistently to young, style-conscious hetero men with a penchant for sneakers, babes, rap, gadgets, and video games.

But, rather than flaunt its longevity via cheesed-up graphics, Complex's revamp gives the magazine a nice shower and shave, with a pared-down font and color palette, a more considered editorial hierarchy, and cleaner layouts overall. (Think Entourage's Turtle in Spago-lunch mode.) Overseen by art director Sean Bumgarner (formerly of Entertainment Weekly), the new design dramatically improves navigation throughout Complex, vital for a magazine that presents itself as a two-fer.

Cover(s)
The magazine still boasts two: a front lifestyle cover, and a back style-guide cover. Bumgarner's June/July front, featuring Wild 'N Out star Nick Cannon, eliminates the flashy fluorescents from before, choosing instead to play up the magazine's signature cyan. Although coverlines still crowd the image, they're now set solely in Aaux, a sans serif, rather than a jarring mix of slab-and-sans styles. On the flip side, actress-cum-cover girl Emmanuelle Chriqui strikes a bikini-babe pose between coverlines that sit tidily within dotted rules or dropped out of bars. Good move: eliminating the teasers touting and giant ampersands of earlier Complex covers that screamed CosmoGuy.

Departments
In the past, the magazine's front-of-book "Sprawl" section rambled visually through nine different subjects, ranging from girls and art to music and video games, with each subcategory sporting its own custom logo. Bumgarner cleans up the section by adding a handy contents page and setting each category name within a neat tag that plays off the ribbon-like qualities of Loop, a new display font.

"Complex Individuals," brief interviews with rap, film, sports, and fashion stars, now have their own section, with a dedicated TOC and color scheme. On the shopping side of the book, the "Addicted" and "Laced" departments also benefit from streamlined headers, TOCs and consistent color accents to locate you topically at a glance. Good move: placing illustrated "TrendHump" tips vertically inside the gutter, rather than crowding them in along the bottom horizontal field.

Feature Well
Previously, Complex's nebulous front-of-book sprawl fed into ill-defined feature-well territory. However, with the June/July issue, the division between the two literally splatters before you, with cover subject Nick Cannon dodging flying tomatoes over Chris Buck's three-page photo montage emblazoned with a Kruger-esque headline.

Continuing on, there are surprises in store: "How to Blow Up," a piece on young entrepreneurs, opens with a whimsical pastel-hued, cake-and-bird illustration by Oksana Badrak; her soft blobby clouds waft lazily throughout the following pages, creating atmosphere and functioning as a visual bridge. Further on, the inevitable hot-chick photo spread is moodier than in previous issues—an eight-pager on model/actress Michelle Lombardo is smoky, not tacky—more Brigitte Bardot, less Jessica Simpson.

Bottom Line
Complex it's not. The redesign has yielded a cleaner, simpler format and the magazine still traffics in the most basic Stuff of most dude-centered rags: go-getters, girls, and gizmos. But, if you're a 20-something guy wanting an easy-to-find fix of sneakers and hotties from a joint that's aesthetically more chill than random, then visit this realigned Complex.

Joyce Rutter Kaye is editor-in-chief of Print, the bimonthly magazine about graphic design and visual culture. Print won the National Magazine Award in 2005 for General Excellence (100,000 circulation and below).