Applications looking ugly (Win98-like)

I've been away from Linux for some years. I installed Arch, but didn't installed any Desktop Environments and I'm currently working with awesome-wm, which is like xmonad, but with an editable config file.
Great. But applications looks very very ugly, Win98-ugly. Everything is so gray and dark that I found myself constantly trying to increase the brightness of my monitor. I know this has something to do with gtk. I installed some gtk-chtheme but changing the theme doesn't help a lot; everything is still dark, I mean, Windows applications **shine bright**  when compared to applications I use on Arch.
So, how can I have nice-looking applications without installing a DE?

I've installed only gtk2 themes because I'm testing them on firefox and firefox's appearence changes after changing the theme. I don't know, maybe it's just the themes themselves but, for instance, using ANY of those themes make the titlebars gray (there are different grays, but they are all grays). Those themes I mentioned are
Adwaita Cupertino L   Nodoka-Aqua      Xfce-b5
Adwaita Cupertino SL  Nodoka-Gilouche  Xfce-basic
Aurora                Nodoka-Looks     Xfce-cadmium
Bluecurve             Nodoka-Midnight  Xfce-curve
CleanIce              Nodoka-Rounded   Xfce-dawn
CleanIce-Dark         Nodoka-Silver    Xfce-dusk
CleanIce-Debian       Nodoka-Squared   Xfce-kde2
CleanIce-Marble       OkayishChicken   Xfce-kolors
Clearlooks            Raleigh          Xfce-light
CortlandChicken       Redmond          Xfce-orange
Crux                  ThinIce          Xfce-redmondxp
Default               Tiger            Xfce-saltlake
Emacs                 Xfce             Xfce-smooth
Industrial            Xfce-4.0         Xfce-stellar
MagicChicken          Xfce-4.2         Xfce-winter
Mist                  Xfce-4.4         oxygen-gtk
Nodoka                Xfce-4.6
Is this the intended look of those themes?
EDIT: For instance Xfce-orange doesn't make the titlebars orange (they are still grayish). It only changes, for instance, the current selected item on a context menu to orange.
Last edited by ar5007eg (2012-12-31 00:30:13)

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