Charmaine began her design and business career while she was still an adolescent when her father put her in charge of the family recreational park. She later got her B.A. in Art, emphasis in printmaking and drawing, while raising two young children. Despite the extra work of parenting, maintaining one to three part-time jobs and still performing all the classwork and studio work, Charmaine still graduated within 4 years. Additionally, her work ethic was and always has been so intense that she was the first artist at Missouri Western State to present a one-person art show that filled the entire college art gallery and continued down the hall. In the early 80s, graduating college under such difficult circumstances was considered almost impossible, which prompted the local news media out to the Senior Exhibit to get her story.

Upon graduation, Charmaine wasted no time in moving her family to Dallas, TX where she began a graphic design career starting from the ground up. Eventually, she started her own business building a client list of over 300 companies--10-15 of which were the mainstay of income. Her design skills continued to improve, but what made word-of-mouth about Charmaine so strong was (and is) the fact that a company could rely on Charmaine getting the job done come hell or high water. No matter what happened, Charmaine always met or exceeded her clients' needs. Reliability meant more to a client than anything else.

Once the kids grew up and left the nest, Charmaine moved back to the Kansas City area where she began building a more limited freelance client list. She became an Art Director for ERA Realty's marketing development. ERA was sold and moved to New Jersey, closing the art department locally.

Charmaine joined Argosy Casino as their in-house designer, and once again, her work ethic was put to the test daily while she handled approximately 20-30 projects simultaneously at any given time. TV and billboard advertising were handled by an external ad agency.

Her work ethic was pushed even further when she joined the Kansas City Station Casino ad agency as Art Director. Except for most newspaper ads and billboards, almost every advertisement or design element that went on paper, banners, kiosk, film signage, direct mail, etc. for 12 restaurants, 2 casinos, the hotel, the entertainment pavilion, for the Kansas City location--and sometimes the St. Charles location--were either designed or built for vendor production by Charmaine.

Once the Grand Opening was over, Charmaine stayed a while longer before accepting a position as Creative Director with a small marketing firm in the Kansas City area. She was in charge of 5 writers, 4 artists, and 2 freelancers and an operating budget of $200,000. Twenty-seven newsletters had to be designed monthly plus marketing and tradeshow materials to promote them. One of the designers she hired wrote of Charmaine, "As my supervisor I found her to possess both a professional attitude and great mentoring skills. The time I worked with her was a period of great professional renewal for myself...I found Charmaine to be quietly confident based on a firm foundation of creative design solutions and production experience." Eventually the Creative Director and Marketing Director positions were eliminated to allow for a VP of Marketing to be brought in.

Charmaine became the Associate Creative Director for IDea Creative Group, owned and operated by Mark Anderson, a former partner of EAT Design, and frequent OMNI award winner. Mark has written of her, "I have worked directly witih Ms. Ross [now Keller] on many projects and found her character to be of the utmost integrity. Frankly, IDea has experienced its share of art directors--both entry-level and career-matured--who could not pass muster. We consider it distinctly refreshing to work with a person who not only 'gets it', but 'gets it right'."

As the outlook for print design became evident that a designer had better start learning about the Internet and how to produce art for it, Charmaine joined Sprint PCS' multimedia team under the Customer Care training division. At that point, she learned a lot about the basics of building art and applications for Internet and intranet deployment. Besides the meat and potatoes of Photoshop and Illustrator of which she had long been using for years, Charmaine acquired skills in Flash, Dreamweaver and Director.

Wanting to know more, Charmaine joined the local user group (named at that time, Kansas City Macromedia User Group), and eventually became the manager for three years. About the same time Adobe aquired Macromedia, Charmaine stepped down as manager in August 2005 and turned the group over to Dee Sadler. The group was wisely split in two divisions, KCDesignCore and KCWebCore, run by Dee Sadler and Buck Sommerkamp.

Charmaine spent from March 2007 to March 2008 as Communications Director on the Advisory Board of LNESC-KC [LULAC National Educational Service Center of Kansas City], www.lnesc-kc.org, where she helped the executive director rebuild the organization back onto it's feet after drastic goverment funding cuts all but destroyed the organization. 

The soul mission of LNESC-KC is to help "at risk" children, mostly Hispanic, improve their odds of not dropping out of school. Hispanic children represent the highest number to drop out of school. The plan of attack begins while the children are still in kindergarten and first grade, then provides programs that take the children through leadership training and eventually college preparation. Most children come from homes where English is not spoken; then go to school where only English is spoken. This reality creates an adverse burden on the child's success in life.

Charmaine designed, researched for material and developed the entire website for LNESC-KC. She spearheaded the preparations for the March 2008 fundraiser, as well as designed and produced many materials for the various student programs. Charmaine wants to make clear that once she finished her volunteer work for LNESC-KC, the website and all other advertising materials were turned over to another web company. All efforts to maintain the consistency of design and code are no longer in her control.

Charmaine has built up her equipment and software base and continues to design as a freelancer. She has begun writing as well.