Hi Stonecherub.
The design you were interested in is difficult (as always if taken from some newspaper site), and I'm not good enough with Vanilla to replicate it. However, if you could settle on Foundation, I've made a wee suggestion for you, see attached. I've only done the upper part of the first page, with the navigaion and the switched order of text and image. The rest should be fairly easy.

Maybe someone else can adapt my suggestion to Vanilla, or even make something better. Good luck!