Made some changes to the overall layout
This time modifiying the actual theme php for greater customisation
went for the 2-column + text-based navigation, also created a 1 coliumn version for another blog.

Also look at embeding video in lightbox. Found wp_prettyphoto that actually takes iframe (as to work with the new vimeo embed code)

Looked at the Vimeo API to extract thumbnails. Created a little tool to generate embed code that works with prettyphoto with thumbnail of the video.