Customising the first item in a view
I personally use preprocess functions to do this, something like the following:

function HOOK_preprocess_views_view_fields(&amp;$vars) {
  if ($vars['view']-&gt;name == 'VIEW_NAME' &amp;&amp; $vars['view']-&gt;row_index == 1) {
    // Do stuff here.
  }
}