Submitted by Michiel, who says:

This is my first attempt at drawing a transit map (or using Inkscape for that matter). It’s Amsterdam’s metro system, which is a relatively simple system. The zones, on the other hand, are not! You can check out the outrageous zoning of Amsterdam’s public transport system here. Some stations lie on zone borders, which means you can travel from within either of those zones to that station while staying in a single zone. Other stations lie very close to borders, but are not on it. All very confusing, but with some help of the Amsterdam public transport company (GVB) I figured it out.

Transit Maps says:

For a first effort, these are rather lovely, Michiel! I like the intelligent use of 60-degree angles to mimic the real-world layout of Amsterdam, and the way that the new Noord-Zuid line slashes through the centre of the map, and the way that that diagonal then continues all the way down to Westwijk… a great visual axis for the whole map.

Of the two, I have to say that I prefer the zone-free version, although I can understand the usefulness of the one featuring zones. I find the colours a little too bright, and the shapes a little too blobby… smaller corner radii might help here. The zone colours are unfortunately at their worst in the Amsterdam Centrum zone, where the grey is so tonally similar to the blue of the canals that it makes them difficult to make out. One has to ask why this zone needs a background colour at all. It’s surrounded by other zones and the IJ, so it could quite easily remain white. This would also draw attention to its pre-eminence as the most important/most central zone of the network.

While we’re speaking of zones, is it necessary to show zones that can’t be reached by Metro on this map? See 5710 and 5714…

Now the big problem: for three-quarters of the map, you do a great job of labeling all the stations horizontally… but then you get to the south-east corner and everything is suddenly angled. It looks strangely inconsistent, and it’s pretty much the first thing I noticed about the map. With some tweaking, I think that you could get everything nice and straight. The hardest part will be Veensepolder and Diemen Zuid, but once you solve that, everything else should fall into place pretty easily.