Another project I have going on is designing logos for a local brewery to go on their tap handles. One of their brews, Port City IPA....errr...its easier for me to just list my thought process:
Port City > Wilmington, NC > cape fear river > PORTS > FORTS > BRICKS! ...naturally.
Downtown Wilmington is filled with old, brick architecture. There's even remnants of a large, stone fort wall from the civil war. AND there's tons of bricked up windows. Why brick up a window?! Yahoo answers claims there used to be a tax per window, so to save money the townspeople would wall them up!
So I went downtown and took some photos of brick archways and various masonry. I was inspired by Chris Dymond's above photo I found through a flickr search. It was the winning photo from a Walled Up Windows contest.
Here's what I came up with: