Hughes' discovery of the Mac in 1993 pushed his illustration work in a more stylised graphic direction. Adopting first Freehand than Adobe Illustrator, he used expanses of flat colour and texture in asymmetric and dynamic layouts, his characters became more elegant and exaggerated, and the type, generally custom designed for each illustration, became an integral part of his imagemaking process. This very influential flat vector style has been dubbed "Sans Ligne" in reference to the European "Ligne Claire" school by artist Will Kane. Though enabled by the Macintosh, Hughes' considers his combination of design, illustration and typography to be a return to the working methods of the poster artists of the early 20th century, a period when artists like the Stenberg Brothers, Cassandre and Jean Carlu combined type, image and layout to achieve a dynamic, integrated whole.