Formated excerpts,..is there an easy way?

I’ve read about plugins that limit the length of words in an excerpt (e.g. Advanced Excerpt which I’ve tried ), but is there any plugin or technique (not too advanced) that can format an excerpt also?

I’m trying to imitate the post summaries/excerpts in http://seedmagazine.com/content/theory/

The idea is to get the image to be on the left and everything else to the right of it; and also strip away everything from the excerpt text fields except the title and excerpt. Additionally no vertical space between the title and the text if possible.

Or do I have to write custom php to do all of this myself? (I’m a raw beginner at php and WP).