The current smileys used in WordPress are antiquated, non-antialiased, and ugly.
The smiley for ;) hardly looks like it is winking, and is hard to recognise as a wink for the first time without looking closely. Now that I am familiar with the smiley, I recognise it, but for somebody that has not been on a WordPress blog before may have trouble recognising it at first.
For this reason, I propose replacing the current set of smileys with ones from the Tango Desktop Project's icon set.
The Tango Desktop Project is an initiative started around three years ago that aimed to improve the icon styling and consistency of free software projects. They provide a reference implementation of their style guide in the form of an icon set, which contains many beautiful icons, including a set of smileys.
In their icon library, you can view a picture of what their icons look like. You can plainly see that this is an improvement over WordPress' current icons.
These icons could even be used in the new dashboard redesign, but they would probably have to be recoloured.
