A follower of the Favorskyi school, he restored epicism to Ukrainian engraving and turned to folk themes.
He was involved in the work on the film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors after illustrating Mykhailo Kotsiubynskyi's Fata Morgana (he used it as the basis for his graduate work), and in 1963 he began working on the design of the book of the same name. But after creating only three engravings, he was invited to join the film crew as a production designer. Parajanov said: "He is not just an artist, but a thinking artist. You could probably find someone more talented than him, but not more thoughtful. He brought us to the Carpathians as a guide. He knew them. He saved us from paysan, from falsity." After the film's release, Yakutovych continued to design the book, and in 1967, the illustrated edition of Kotsiubynskyi's Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors was published. His second project in cinema was the film Zahar Berkut by Leonid Osyka in 1971.
Yakutovych's creative style was formed in the 1960s, when he, along with Oleksandr Hubariev, Oleksandr Danchenko, Hryhorii Havrylenko, and Valerii Lamakh, resolutely opposed social realism genre painting with a new system of the pictorial art. During this short period of the Khrushchev Thaw, young artists were able to experiment and make discoveries in art.
Yakutovych's engravings are constructed in terms of spatial solutions. Light and shadow play a dominant role, regardless of whether the action takes place in daylight or artificial light. The artist's ex libris are characterized by the authenticity of figurative expression, rich imagination and virtuoso mastery. He is the author of stamps, envelopes, and postcards based on Ukrainian folk songs. A documentary film Ivan from Stanymyr was made about Yakutovych's creative art.