Designing My Red/Gold Theme

I’m in the middle of designing the red/gold theme for my app, and I’m not happy with the results so far. Here are two variations that I’ve thought of, and I don’t think either is good enough.

Variation One:

Variation Two:

Both of them look garish. I think I need to change the gold colour to look more gold as well.

[Update: In the end I went with neither of them and used a third alternative. You can see it a little in my next post.]