Charles Barkley, Spike Lee and Kaveh Akbar: The Work That Made Nishat Akhtar

Nishat Akhtar is a designer, artist, and creative educator with a long tenure shaping brand, product, and marketing work for some of the world’s biggest brands, including Google, Nike, Adobe, and Amazon.

As chief creative officer at Instrument, she leads the company’s creative vision, guiding storytelling, design, and creative experimentation. Outside of work, she maintains an active art practice, collaborating with The New York Times, Adobe, and the ACLU, and sharing her perspective through talks and workshops worldwide.

LBB> The ad/music video from my childhood that stays with me…

Nishat> Commercials were iconic in the '80s and '90s when I was growing up, and the Nike spots of that era were undeniable. Charles Barkley’s ‘I am not a role model’ and Spike Lee as Mars Blackmon were some of my favourites.

It’s funny writing this now, thinking how so many years later, I ended up working at Wieden+Kennedy, becoming very close to David Kennedy (RIP) and walking the halls amongst those that authored those spots so many years before I got there.

LBB> The ad/music video/game/web platform that made me want to get into the industry…

Nishat> Fun fact: I originally started art school as a fashion major. I had learned to sew from my mom, who had learned to sew along with everyone in her generation in India. I was attracted to the study of fashion because of the reciprocal influence between fashion, art and culture.

Shortly after, I began my first year in this course of study, I got a distaste for the fashion industry – the absolute wastefulness and mistreatment of women – and opted to change to study graphic design.

Design was its own language of influence, and I was attracted to its connection of artistry to media. Turns out, what I really wanted was a way to tell stories through craft, whether it was fashion, graphic design, or illustration. Each has always been, and continues to be, a means to that end.

LBB> The creative work that I keep revisiting…

Nishat> In my family and culture, it’s common to just break into a line of poetry, and I love how dropping a line as a reference to whatever is in front of you (a life quandary, or even a work problem) can bring levity and clarity to the moment. That said, I am often revisiting a handful of books, not just for myself, but so I can reference lines to OTHERS in meetings and presentations… to bring some other flavour to our work on the regular.

Kaveh Akbar wrote a book last year called ‘Martyr’. And there is a line I hold with such reverence, which I find myself quoting regularly. It may be new, but it will be lasting. “When asked about the difficulties of sculpture, Michelangelo said, “It is easy. You just chip away all the stone that isn’t David.”

Others that you will hear me referencing are Yi Fu Tuan’s ‘Space and Place’, and Jhumpa Lahiri’s ‘Translating Myself and Others’. Art can be our greatest influence, not just whatever is cycling around on screens. It’s so important to get it off the screen – into a book, into an art gallery – and determine your own point of view, which you can then share, and explain how it meant something to you. Sharing is a form of cherishing.

LBB> My first professional project…

Nishat> I was working at a fashion ad agency in New York way back in the day, and the first photoshoot I got to attend was with Kevin Bacon and Naomi Campbell as the models. It's funny how things come full circle – I started in fashion, went into design, and still ended up adjacent to fashion.

LBB> The piece of work that made me so angry that I vowed to never make anything like *that*…

Nishat> My attraction to working for big brands telling big stories (especially at that time) was soon faced with the harsh reality of what it meant to manipulate the audience by heavily manipulating the subject matter. In working in fashion advertising for years, the retouching of women to uphold a toxic beauty standard didn’t align with my values.

I left that industry not long after, and a decade later, I was excited to find a new standard for how women could be celebrated in their real bodies. I’m forever grateful and proud of that work with Nike. It felt like true innovation – a new standard. A redefinition of beauty that was long overdue.

LBB> The piece of work that still makes me jealous…

Nishat> In 2024 at Cannes, Meta did a stunning short film in collaboration with Es Devlin. It was one of those projects that just takes your breath away, and makes your heart ache and say, “I wish I had worked on that”. The experience reimagined what an activation could be: poetic, immersive, and quietly radical. It captured everything I care about in design: emotional resonance, surprise, intentionality, and pushing the limits of format to say something human. And, it’s a reminder that those are the things TO care about.

LBB> The creative project that changed my career…

Nishat> Leaving the world of fashion and sports culture for a creative director role doing Google work at Instrument felt like a leap into the unknown. I thought I understood ‘big brands’ after Nike, but Google was another universe entirely. What surprised me wasn’t the scale, it was the humanity, even while in tech. Projects like Google I/O and Google Photos showed me how deeply design could connect people to technology in a meaningful, emotional way, and the scale of it all taught me how to think about an audience even bigger than anything I’d worked with before.

Working at Instrument gave me the space to grow into leadership on my own terms, drawing from poetry, art, and music to shape my creative voice. This leap was a bet – a win – and there’s still so much yet to create.

LBB> The work that I’m proudest of…

Nishat> The Instrument brand is a system to be proud of, it's something to create and expand upon.

LBB> The recent project I was involved in that excited me the most…

Nishat> One of the greatest things about our rebrand from a few years ago is the foundation it created to build upon. It wasn’t just about a new look; it was about designing a system that invites evolution. That foundation encourages photography, illustration, and motion to push us stylistically, keeping the brand alive and expressive.

We developed open-source typefaces that are now used by millions of people globally, which is wild and deeply gratifying. But what excites me most is how that spirit of openness has carried forward. We’re currently building tools that allow people to co-create typographic animations and designs without needing any formal design training. And for me, that’s the most rewarding part, making something that others can pick up and run with. I love seeing how people take a tool and make it their own. It shifts the brand from being something we control to something we share, which feels like the future.