How to do a block that displays an image thumbnail teaser and several titles of similar stories from the same content type?

Take a look at http://www.themesnap.com/theme-demos/publisher-theme/node where feature blocks #2 and #3 display an image thumbnail teaser and several titles of similar stories.

I would like to know how to be able to do this?
I know most of the basics of ALMOST getting there with CCK and Views (and Imagecache) but I don't know how to work things so that the first part of the block is different (has a thumbnail, teaser text and different size headline font) from the rest of the content underneath within the same block (just headlines w no teasertext or thumbnail).

I would also like to be able to do the same type of thing in my views listings, like here at http://www.thecitizen.com/~citizen0/taxonomy/term/4 where the first few stickied stories (top 2 or 3) are different in format and then once they are unstickied or fall lower in the list as new stories are added, they take on the general "teaser" format with the smaller heads and no thumbnails.

Right now I just have a standard format for all the teasers/views listings but would really prefer the top stories/stickied ones to have a much more "dominant appearance" with a bigger pic & headline.

I am sure it must be pretty simple but just cannot figure out off the top of my head how to set it up? Can someone point me in the right direction?

Thanks a lot:)

Christine