Expanding what a trusted brand could mean to a new generation.
AAA had more than a century of trust.
The opportunity was to make that expertise feel as useful tomorrow as it had been yesterday.
Creative Direction · Art Direction · Brand Strategy · Identity · UX · Digital Experience
01 / THE CHALLENGE
Expanding what a trusted brand could mean.
AAA already held something enormously valuable: generations of recognition and trust.
The challenge was to build on that equity — moving beyond the perception of AAA as primarily a roadside service and creating a more relevant relationship with a younger, digitally connected audience.
AAA Living and VIA already offered rich travel and lifestyle content across print and digital. The opportunity was to bring those separate experiences into a more coherent ecosystem — connecting AAA's history of expertise with discovery, usefulness and possibility.
The opportunity wasn't to replace what people trusted. It was to expand what AAA could mean to them.
Existing editorial ecosystem — AAA Living print and VIA digital.
02 / LISTENING BEFORE DESIGN
Understand the person before designing the experience.
Before defining a new experience, we needed to understand the person moving through it.
Existing AAA audience information and research helped us build a representative user: a younger, digitally fluent traveler accustomed to finding information quickly and moving naturally between content, inspiration and services.
Mapping that journey exposed both opportunities and friction — and gave the team a clearer foundation for deciding what the experience actually needed to do.
Good systems begin by paying attention to the behavior already there.
Early sketches and wireframes — connecting content, membership, discovery and utility.
Responsive experience architecture across mobile and desktop.
03 / FINDING THE IDEA
From trusted resource to invitation.
The research pointed toward an opportunity larger than a website redesign.
AAA had always helped people get where they were going. AAA Living could help inspire where they might go next.
That shift created the foundation for GO BOLD — an organizing idea connecting content, membership and discovery across an expanding ecosystem of experiences.
Early GO BOLD ecosystem — connecting the idea across digital, print, mobile, content and emerging channels.
GO BOLD visual exploration — turning travel and discovery into an invitation to experience more.
04 / EXPANDING THE IDEA
From an idea people could see to one they could join.
GO BOLD began as an organizing idea for a more connected AAA Living experience.
As that thinking expanded into social and shared storytelling, #GoBold turned the idea outward — creating an invitation for people to participate, share and discover alongside the brand.
What began as a creative direction could now work across channels while remaining recognizable as one connected experience.
05 / FROM SYSTEM TO EXPERIENCE
Turning the brand into something people could use.
With the foundation established, the system moved into experience design.
Content architecture, wireframes and iterative page structures helped translate AAA Living's depth of travel, lifestyle and service content into a clearer digital hierarchy.
The redesigned AAA Living experience brought discovery and utility together — making inspiration more accessible while creating clearer paths into membership and services.
View of existing AAA member landing page with early mockups.
Rebranded page with magazine, new app interface, new podcast segments.
06 / ONE EXPERIENCE, ANYWHERE
Designing for context, not simply screen size.
Mobile required more than reducing the desktop experience.
Navigation, hierarchy and interaction had to respond to a different context while preserving the same underlying brand, content priorities and sense of discovery.
The result was one experience expressed appropriately across devices rather than separate desktop and mobile ideas. Responsive design wasn't about shrinking the desktop experience. It was about preserving what mattered when the context changed.
07 / FROM EXPERIENCE TO ECOSYSTEM
Letting the idea travel.
What began as an organizing idea could now travel across an expanding ecosystem.
GO BOLD had established the strategic direction, and #GoBold extended its participatory expression. Together, that thinking could move across AAA Living's digital experience, print, mobile, social, video, music and targeted media — connecting AAA's established authority with contemporary ways people discover inspiration and plan experiences.
The strongest ideas don't belong to a format. They create a system that formats can belong to.
Bold Predictions: A participatory social series inviting members to share what they hoped to make happen — from financial freedom to unforgettable experiences.
ONE APP FOR ALL. A unified mobile experience bringing AAA content, services and resources into one everyday tool.
GO BOLD W/. A video series celebrating the different ways AAA members pursue experiences, ambitions and everyday adventures.
AAA + SPOTIFY. Branded listening experiences extending the idea into road trips, travel, mindfulness and entertainment.
08 / MAKING CONSISTENCY USEFUL
Turning design decisions into infrastructure.
The same challenge existed elsewhere within the broader AAA ecosystem.
Email communications had accumulated across teams and business groups, creating inconsistent visual approaches and fragmented customer experiences.
Rather than solving individual emails one at a time, we audited the existing work, identified recurring needs and developed a shared style guide that could create greater consistency while remaining flexible enough for different communications.
The goal was not simply better-looking email.
It was a system other people could use.
09 / PERFORMANCE
Better systems created measurable movement.
Creative systems ultimately have to work for people — and for the business.
The email program produced measurable gains across audience growth, engagement and action, demonstrating that greater consistency wasn't simply an aesthetic improvement.
It helped make communication more effective.
10 / CLOSING
Making complexity feel clear.
Across content, UX, identity, campaign, mobile and communications, the challenge remained remarkably consistent: preserve the trust people already had in AAA while creating clearer, more relevant ways for that value to reach them.
The work wasn't about making AAA simply look different.
It was about helping more people recognize how much was already there for them.
NATHAN SPOOR
CREATIVE DIRECTOR