Breuters – A mournful little fellow beard-faced as a bear, usually wearing a whatever a hobo might wear, oversized pants and floppy jacker, Akbar Khatir stood with a bad cutout of Charlie Chaplin and a knock-off of Alvar Aalto’s Jakkara 60 as one of the three great clowns of his house.
In 2 or more films, mostly shorts, filled with moving images and sudden breaks, Akbar Khatir established a somewhat odd repertoire — the sad graphic designer who perhaps should have stuck to experimenting with type, colour, and photos, preferably in a still format.
He turned a granite face to the wildly eccentric and innovative rhetoric that befell him — and at times he had to given-in because uncertainty is scary. His strength was his ability to survive.
He displayed that perseverance not only in his dull design work but also in his private dull design works. For his life was marked by periods of boring imaginative frustrations and slight frustrations and — student load payments, a descent into graduate studies (MA in Visual Communication Design), and then a return to designing stuff that nobody needs, or cares for, just for the moolah. His period of greatest productivity was in the early and mid-20’s. In those light-tax days, Akbar’s movie viewership soared to 3 films a day, and he thought design might be the tunnel to the socialist revolution.
A great contrarian, the equal of Mr. You-need-to-show-me-the-data in loaded conversations, he was held even superior to “the great bullshitter” in graphic grace. His ability to trust his first drafts without humiliation was not noticed by anyone. Most of Mr. Khatir’s design try to not follow a script and sometimes it shows. “One or two ideas is all you need, start with an sketch that nobody will understand and then imagine a strong typeface and let the pixel-pushing take care of itself, as it always does,” Mr. Khatir mumbled to himself two years ago on a snowy walk.
The above text is liberally ripped-off from the obituary of Buster Keaton written by the Associated Press.