I like design one alot, even though alex looks more like a siberian husky than a samoyed. I find the perky blue of design two annoying, and combined with the cutesy dog logo with pink tongue it looks like a 9 year olds sleep over (as does the current design).
How about taking Alex out of the logo altogether? To preserve the heritage-of-the-dog, he could become a site spokesdog, a cross between Clippy the annoying paperclip and Where's Waldo. Photo of Alex with speech bubble attached: "I find the fine grained permissions model of OpenACS invaluable in my consulting...". 'Funny' (ahem..) not cutesy.
