This week Slate launched a redesign of their site. Not long ago, the New York Times did the same thing.

I suspect that two parts of the reasoning behind these moves are 1) the realization that most people are reading Web sites on a monitor that can handle resolutions greater than 800×600, and 2) the need to incorporate podcasts, blogging, and the like. These new formats are becoming more and more widespread, and they should be considered, but I think it’s possible to overwhelm your readers with too much content in too many formats and to present them with too many choices.

Both sites now suffer from both of these problems, but I think that largely the Times got it right and Slate got it wrong. Here’s what I think Slate did wrong, and a few things I think the Times did right. Slate: The first thing I noticed when I looked at the new version of Slate was the new logo. Creating a new logo for any established brand is a risky thing: you don’t know how users or customers will react, and you immediately lose the sense of familiarity they had with the old identity. The old Slate logo was no design triumph, but to me it was familiar and at least arguably elegant. It has now been replaced with giant, blocky, bottom-heavy letters that look as if the designer just jacked the font up to 60 pixels.

Next, I noticed that the main center image had no less than four blocks of text. I find this kind of scatterbrained. If you’re using an image, it should be to highlight one article, or maybe two on the same subject. All these titles do relate to a sort of general “movie” category, but there’s no real focus.

Later, I carelessly rolled my mouse over the menus in the left-hand column, and was startled when the entire center of the page was taken over by four columns of article listings. Panicked, I moused up to the logo, and after a second or two, the gargantuan menu disappeared.

I looked for the usual old reverse-chronological list of articles, my typical way of navigating the site. I scrolled past a blog box, a podcast box, a useless feature called “Line of the Day,” a slideshow, and some ads, and finally found what I was looking for, only to find each article entry had five elements with no fewer than five different type styles.

The Times: Again, the first thing I notice is the header, which has plenty of white space around the venerable print masthead. The “above the fold” area has the familiar feel of the print edition. Most of this section is occupied by print, links or realtively small images that relate directly to the stories they describe.

The rest of the home page includes more images, along with blog callouts and video, but doesn’t have the sort of frenzied, confused feeling of Slate. I think this is because the Times’s designers recognized that they were still designing for a newspaper, whose readers primarily visit the site for news and analysis in a print format. The added features feel like extras, augmenting the print articles, rather than replacing them.

It’s probably careless of me to compare these two sites, as the Times has a much longer tradition and a well-defined mission. Slate should be allowed and expected to experiment and innovate. But the new design makes it feel as if it’s lost its way.