Format post listing on front page

I’m using WP as a “light” CMS (www.wpr.se). This means, among other things, that I don’t have the traditional blog front page with the X latest posts (full text or excerpts). There’s just a listing of the five latest post headlines.

It would be valuable though to be able to format the latest post differently on the front page. I’d like to give just the first post more impact with a greater headline font size AND the post excerpt.

The remaining four would then be just headlines.

Today I’m using “get_archives” and this doesn’t give me the option to change the format between those five headlines.

I’ve looked at all the tag specifications, searched for hacks and plugins. But I can’t find anything that points in the direction I want to go.

Any ideas, suggestions or even code snippets would be greatly appreciated!